Exhibition 'Concurrent' with Jansen van Staden and Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo
Jansen van Staden and Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo’s upcoming exhibition Concurrent, curated by John Fleetwood, will be opening at Galleri Image in Aarhus, Denmark, 19 August – 9 October 2022.
Their work deals with the complexities of family relationships and places, legacies of violence, and the possibilities of transformation that photography holds. It bears the entanglement of histories of Apartheid and colonialism in the present, but also about practices of transition and countering.
Both photographers use the complex rituals of documentary practice to tell their stories, and at the same time, to process these events: rethinking and repositioning them. It deals with the multiplicity of the medium and its rituals that unfold - that photography is not just the moment of making the image, but a complex set of engagements that accumulatively become a mode of meaning-making. A current of many streams.
In Microlight, Van Staden’s search starts at an end: the death of his father. He searches back in time - the connections that his father had with family; the artefacts of history at museums and in homes and family albums, to understand the traces of the origins of how the ideologies of apartheid manifested in the South African Border War that disrupted his father’s life at the age of conscription, 17. Much of his work deals with the traumas that now have become intergenerationally entangled. His narratives are tapestries of anecdotes, small things that make bigger pictures.
Slaghuis II, is Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo’s response to the growing up in a home, that was also a tavern. Marked by the violence that is associated by his experiences, he now transforms the original spaces of home and tavern into his studio, taking up violence as a visual language. Hlatshwayo’s exploration has become one of working and reworking of photographs, as images, as objects, as textures, ripped and rephotographed after they were exposed to the conditions of the tavern. His performances become a retrace of memories - of interacting with the camera, of private re-enactments.
Both photographers are thinking of the place of documentary photography and its practice – as experiment, as position. One, that allows photography to erase histories while writing them.
In addition to the exhibition, a symposium will be held on 29 September 2022 with the artists, John Fleetwood and Jacob Lund, Associate Professor at the dept. of Aesthetics and Culture, Aarhus University.
About Jansen van Staden
Jansen van Staden (b. 1986) is a South African photographer based in Cape Town. Van Staden uses photography as a conceptual entry point to reflect on personal imaginaries and social constructs of belonging and disconnect. He uses personal anecdotes and images of chance to construct narratives about the complexities of contemporary South Africa. He was awarded the Charta Dummy Book award in 2021 (Rome) and his work was exhibited in “If a Tree falls in a Forest” at the Rencontres d’Arles 2021.
https://jansenvanstaden.com
About Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo
Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo (b. 1993) is a South African photographer based in Johannesburg. His work deals with themes of first-hand and generational trauma, violence and memory. He is interested in the materiality of photographs. He was awarded the 2019 CAP Prize for Contemporary African Photography. His work was exhibited in “Before the night” in Fotomuseum Winterthur (2019).
https://thembinkosihlatshwayo.onfotomat.com
About John Fleetwood
John Fleetwood (b. 1970, South Africa) is a photography curator, educator and director of Photo:
He recently curated ‘Intimacy and Resistance: An intergenerational dialogue on South African photobooks’, Photobook Week Aarhus (Denmark 2020), ‘Five Photographers: A tribute to David Goldblatt’ (South Africa, Mozambique, Mali et al. 2018-2019), ‘Of traps and tropes’ as part of Kerkennah International Photography Festival (Tunisia, 2018), Amongst other things’ (Mindelo, Cape Verde 2019). In 2017, he was guest editor for Aperture’s Platform Africa edition. From 2002-2015 Fleetwood was the director of the Market Photo Workshop.
https://www.phototool.co.za/team
About Galleri Image
Galleri Image was founded in 1977 as the first public gallery for photography in Scandinavia, and for many years, was the only one of its kind in Denmark. Since then, Galleri Image has gained an international reputation as a non-profit exhibition space that has contributed significantly to the recognition of photography as an independent art form.
https://galleriimage.dk/index.php/en/current
For more information, contact info@phototool.co.za or visit https://galleriimage.dk/index.php/en/current to learn more about Galleri Image and the exhibition.
Posted 15/08/2022.