Seminar: "Concurrent" with Jansen van Staden and Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo

Gallery Image presented the exhibition  Concurrent  with works by the South African artists Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo and Jansen van Staden and curated by John Fleetwood. Concurrent  is an exhibition of two South African photographers' work: Jansen van Staden and Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo. 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 have now become intergenerationally entangled. His narratives are tapestries of anecdotes, small things that make bigger pictures. 

Slaghuis II, is Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo's response to growing up in a home, which was also a tavern. Marked by the violence that is associated with 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 stories while writing them. 

- John Fleetwood, exhibition curator

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
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 disconnection. 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.

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).

John Fleetwood John Fleetwood (b. 1970, Johannesburg) is a South African photography curator and educator. He directs  Photo: a platform, based in Johannesburg that develops and promotes socially relevant photography projects and is the co-head of BA Photography at the Royal College of Art (KABK), The Hague, The Netherlands. From 2002-2015 Fleetwood was the director of the Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg. He is the convenor and founder of the Centers of Learning for Photography in Africa. 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' (incl. Johannesburg, Bamako, Maputo, Durban, 2018-2019) and 'Of traps and tropes' as part of Kerkennah International Photography Festival (Tunisia, 2018). In 2017, he was guest editor for Aperture's Platform Africa edition.

EVENTS
Seminar: "Concurrent"
Thursday, 29 September 2022,  Jutland Art Academy , Mejlgade 32-34, 8000 Aarhus C.
In conjunction with the exhibition Concurrent, Galleri Image presented a seminar on South African photography focusing on the themes of the exhibition with talks by the artists Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Jansen van Staden, exhibition curator John Fleetwood and Jacob Lund, Associate Professor at the dept. of Aesthetics and Culture, Aarhus University. The seminar was moderated by Judith Schwarzbart, Art Historian and former Rector at Jutland Art Academy, and was organized by Galleri Image in a collaboration with Jutland Art Academy and Aarhus University.

The seminar included discussions on the relationship between photography, memory and aesthetics, as well as intergenerational trauma and the transformative possibilities that photography practice can hold. 

The exhibition was opened on 19 August by head of culture committee for the city of Aarhus, Mette Bjerre. The exhibition and the seminar were supported by The Danish Arts Foundation, The Augustinus Foundation, and City of Aarhus (Kulturudviklingspool).

IMAGES: Art works from the series Microlight by Jansen van Staden & Slaghuis II by Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo

Photo credit: Mikkel Kaldal

Posted 28/09/2022