Apartheid’s rise and fall in photos
NEWTOWN - After acclaimed runs in Munich, Milan and New York City, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life will be on exhibition at Museum Africa.
The exhibition will offer an encyclopedic view of apartheid and photographic practice, and represents the culmination of more than a decade of research supported by New York’s International Centre of Photography.
The exhibition will include the work of more than 70 South African photographers and artists, 27 films and a book.
The centre’s executive director, Mark Lubell described the show’s South African culmination as “fitting”.
“The exhibition celebrates South African photographers and many of the images come from the rich collection of Museum Africa,” he said.
“[The centre] supported South African photographers since [its] earliest days, with [Peter] Magubane’s South Africa in 1978 and South Africa: The Cordoned Heart in 1986. We are proud to continue to showcase their important work.”
The exhibition will present a “field of narratives” about varied photographic practice, from colonial ethnographic studies to “insurrectional” photography during apartheid, and will include reflection on contemporary post-apartheid views.
Exhibition publicist Lesley Perkes said the exhibition would provide fertile ground for debates across various issues.
“The six-month long exhibition and its accompanying media [will participate in] a national conversation about the photographers; some unknown, some deceased, some still practising here and abroad,” she said.
She added that themes addressed by the exhibition will include select historic milestones during the liberation struggle and apartheid, and the difficulties we confront around the “mythologising and commodification of history’s visual landscape”.
The Rise and Fall of Apartheid will run from 13 February until 29 June at Museum Africa, 121 Bree Street, Newtown.
Details: www.riseandfallofapartheid.org; Twitter @RnF_Apartheid
