In Landscapes Between Then and Now, Nicola Brandt examines the increasingly compelling and diverse cross-disciplinary work of photographers and artists made during the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid and into the contemporary era.
By examining specific artworks made in South Africa, Namibia and Angola, Brandt sheds light on established and emerging themes related to aftermath landscapes, embodied histories, (un)belonging, spirituality and memorialization. She shows how landscape and identity are mutually constituted, and profiles this process against the background of the legacy of the acutely racially divisive policies of the apartheid regime that are still reflected on the land. As a signpost throughout the book, Brandt draws on the work of the renowned South African photographer Santu Mofokeng and his critical thinking about landscape.
Landscapes Between Then and Now explores how practitioners who engage with identity and their physical environment as a social product might reveal something about the complex and fractured nature of postcolonial and contemporary societies. Through diverse strategies and aesthetics, they comment on inherent structures and epistemologies of power whilst also expressing new and radical forms of self-determinism. Brandt asks why these cross-disciplinary works ranging from social documentary to experimental performance and embodied practices are critical now, and what important possibilities for social and political reflection and engagement they suggest.
Author(s): Nicola Brandt
Series: Photography, Place, Environment
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 282
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Glossary of Acronyms
Map of the Region
Introduction and Background
South Africa, Namibia and Angola’s entangled histories
Apartheid policies
Constructed race categories and critical whiteness
Defining space/place and landscape
No innocent landscapes
The ethnographic gaze
Defining documentary and an ethics of seeing
Zanele Muholi’s Somnyama Ngonyama
The land question
Emerging landscapes
Artist collectives
Reflecting on German-colonial heritage and the Namibian Genocide
1 Beyond Bearing Witness
Women in documentary photography
Margaret Courtney-Clarke: In the harsh light of the present
A departure from social documentary
Contemporary representations of ‘home’ and the metropolis
2 Santu Mofokeng’s Appropriated Landscapes
Sunflower Harvest: Power dynamics of apartheid on the land
Renewal denied
The ‘colonising camera’
Inverting the tropes of colonial landscape depictions
3 Picturing Stillness, Aura and Ambivalence
Santu Mofokeng: Chasing shadows
Andrew Tshabangu: ‘A guide and ferryman who helps us see’
Unequal Scenes and poisoned landscapes
Sabelo Mlangeni’s My Storie
4 Namibia’s War of Independence: Power, Knowledge and Amnesia
John Liebenberg’s Bush of Ghosts
An installation after John Liebenberg’s Grave Site at Uupindi
Jo Ractliffe’s As Terras do Fim do Mundo
Beyond the rhetoric of revelation
5 Memorial Landscapes: Between Documentary Realism and the Imaginary
Nicola Brandt: The Reiterdenkmal and Changing Histories
Practices of historical retrieval and healing
Kristin Capp: Morenga’s Namibia
David Goldblatt: Memorials and structures that embody value systems
Kiluanji Kia Henda’s conceptual practice
Indifference: A near-documentary approach
6 Histories and Landscapes Embodied
Reclaiming bodies, reclaiming spaces
A conditional presence in the landscape
Berni Searle’s Trilogy Black Smoke Rising
Isabel Katjavivi’s The Melting Passage of the Self
Queering spaces: The Dance of the Rubber Tree
‘Gender is a playground’
‘A nomad in time’: Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s ‘hauntologies’
Sethembile Msezane’s Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell
7 Imagined Geographies and New Practices of Self
Between ‘reality’ and postcolonial imagination
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
