ARTISTS:

Roger Ballen
Lives and works in Johannesburg since 1982.
‘Until the early 1990's my aesthetic vision was firmly rooted in the socio-documentary. Over the past decade I have sensed that the essential meaning of my work resides in the dramatic acts of my subjects as I interact with them in their lives, and that meaning in my work is generated by the power of the image to raise the scenario to the universal and metaphorical through the formal intensification of these significant moments.’

Jane Alexander
Lives and works in Cape Town.
‘Adventure Center, depicts an area in the centre of Cape Town where I lived for ten years. By the end of the 1990's it had become a popular recreation area for clubs, bars, agencies for tourist expeditions into Africa, drug trade, informal work for African refugees, and a high concentration of displaced children.
During Apartheid, these children would be incarcerated during the summer tourist season and released back onto the streets in winter. Now they lie and sleep on the street throughout the year.’

David Goldblatt
Lives and works in Johannesburg.
‘For the first time I’m using colour photography for my personal work. This is largely because developments in colour negative emulsions and digital reproduction technology have made colour a much more flexible and therefore interesting medium for me.’

Steve Hilton-Barber
Lives and works in Johannesburg.
‘The savage noble and the noble savages. Photography and an african Initiation.
Two hundred and twenty naked initiates gathered in the indigenous bush in the foothills of the Northern Drakensburg mountain. For six weeks the initiates would journey into manhood. They would be circumcised and learn the ways of their people. They would graduate by dancing the Mayiwayiwane and later take wives and have children. This is their rite of passage. It was the winter of 1990 in South Africa.
I was accused of violating the sacredness of the ritual and of portraying "black as animals". The debate revolved around race and nudity.
Initiation ceremonies continue to take place. Some result in deaths from botched circumcision and the cultural practice begins to be publicly examined. Society is still divided on the issue.’

Mustafa Maluka
Lives and works in Amsterdam.
‘I’m constantly playing games with people’s assumptions. I am interested in the way we react to a situation, we tend to create a safe place inside our heads for new facts to become normal.The social structure of reality is created by people, it’s not reality. It is there to organize the potential chaotic.’

Santu Mofokeng
Lives and works in Soweto.
‘The black photo album/look at me: 1890-1910. These are images that urban black working and middle-class families had commissioned, requested or tacitly sanctioned. Painterly in style, they are evocative of artifices of Victorian photography (most of them). Yet, all too often these images run the risk of being dismissed or ignored as evidence of pathologies of bourgeois delusions.’

Zwelethu Mthethwa
Lives and works in Cape Town.
‘Men in Private Spaces, focuses on men that live in Durban hostels. Historically these men have always been perceived as foreigners or the other since they all come from outside the city of Durban. Pictures on their walls depict their private worlds, for example, images of sport and soft porn. The size of these photos has been made small to further enhance a sense of privacy and intimacy. The scale draws one to be at close range when looking at the images, to be very much aware of one’s private space.’

Thobile Sheperd Nompunga
Lives and works in the Township: Guguletu.
‘A self-portrait is a photographic document relating in brief or extensively or supplying answers to some questions about somebody’s profile. Further and above, a self-portrait or a collection of one’s self-portraits placed in a chronological manner completes one’s biography. As a street-photographer I have worked extensively within the African townships of the Cape Peninsula. I recently decided to turn a camera on myself in an attempt of starting to document my own life.’

Obie Oberholzer
Lives and works in Grahamstown.
‘My photographs tell stories along the roads of Southern Africa. They speak of casual, odd and strange meetings in a country harsh with contrasts, where the landscapes are often reflected in people’s faces and expressions. I journey on small lonely roads, where I search for the soul of my country, which I call the "Happysadland". I want my images to show emotions that words cannot explain.’

Robin Rhode
Lives and works in Johannesburg.
‘ I have been working extensively with new media and performance art, showing a keen interest in the depiction of my social identity by reordering frames of reference. I am committed to local issues and sites, attesting to life and death struggles of survival. As a reminder of the persistent battle to occupy terrain, I insert the body into fictive spaces that also function as the real.’

Bernie Searle
Lives and works in Cape Town.
‘Both the "Colour Me" and the later "Discoloured" series explore the body as testimony of experience, in which the self is seen as an ongoing process of constrution and re-construction.
‘Conversing with pane I & II’ The use of black henna to stain my body purplish blue in the ‘Discoloured’ series explores the subtle ways in which trauma or damage is inscribed on the racialised and gendered body. These images suggest that marks of trauma hint at a deeper damage, which are not only experienced physically, buy psychologically and emotionally, which is often more difficult to ‘identify’ or ‘testify’.’

David Southwood
Lives and works in Cape Town.
‘Somewhere in Johannesburg there is an irritated man who is constantly mistaken for me. The implications of this recurring error are what caused me to initiate this work in progress.
The methology behind the process involved photographing people who A) were people familiar to me whose appearances had been likened to mine and B) people who I had never met and who were referred to me after I mailed my friends and asked them to scout for look-alikes and approach strangers if necessary.’

Hentie Van der Merwe
Lives and works in Johannesburg and Belgium.
This installation consists of photographs from a number of different archives, starting with that of my father, particularly the landscapes he photographed during his travels in and around South Africa during the 1966's. Combined with these are photographs I took myself as well as images sourced from public archives.
Archives are like father figures in the way that they assume a certain kind of authority and create expectations regarding racial, sexual and political identities.’

Minnette Vári
Lives and works in Johannesburg.
‘There were times when, told in the language of international news, the histories of my country would unfold in unrecognisable ways, and my place within these stories would become disjointed and unbearable. I wanted to speak of the discomfort of a thousand ill-fitting interpretations. Using television images relating to the transformative events between 1994 and 1998, I attempted to locate my own implicit presence in the narrative of these critical times.’

Sue Williamson
Lives and works in Cape Town.
During the long proeedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa, there were only two moments when there was a direct confrontation between victim and accused. Face to face at last with the perpetrator, the victim was able to pose the burning questions in his mind. In an interactive video piece, Sue Williamson looks at the moments in the proceedings of the Truth Commission when this occurred. In Can´t Forget, Can´t Remember, actual recorded transcripts from the hearings are played over text and flashback images of the event, in a rough recreation of the courtroom scene.