The weekend after Hurricane Sandy hit NYC, AIAC’s Sean Jacobs and I (we’re academics in our day jobs) attended Encounters with the African Archive, a symposium at New York University. The symposium coincided with the exhibition series Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive at The Walther Collection Project Space, and was intended to create an […]
Pieter Hugo, the critically acclaimed South African photographer, has done an interview with Guernica (H/T Glenna Gordon) in which he seems to be taking issue with criticisms of his work, especially the “Nollywood” series: “It’s quite scary when academics start dictating to artists that they should be politically correct or follow certain rules of behavior — which means […]
In a guest post Andrea Stultiens writes about Pieter Hugo retrospective at The Hague Museum of Photography (The Netherlands). “The exhibition in The Hague also made me realize that I am not the only person overestimating and at the same time underestimating what Hugo’s photographs stand for or what they can and cannot tell with what they show.”
No we’re not on a mini-Spoek Mathambo marathon today. Intrigued by Spoek’s remix of Seun Kuti and the trailer for his new album, we googled Spoek anew and stumbled upon this video of a 2011 presentation Spoek gave at TedxSoweto (it was only uploaded onto Youtube at the end of last month). What I find useful […]
As part of a series of year-end posts–we’re taking a break from Friday, December 23, till January 5, 2012, we’re hoping to post 10 “Lists of 10″ this week. (We’re trying to be cool by calling it “10×10″). So two lists per day. Orlando Reade, who blogs for us from London, starts us of with his list of 10 photographers to watch in 2012. He’s picked five African artists and five Europeans who have been working in Africa.
Many of you know those spectacular images of burning computer parts and beautiful, sad young men, taken in some God-forsaken corner of polluted Ghana where the ‘West’ has dumped all its obsolete toys to be ‘recycled’. Now, here’s Southern Africa’s answer: we can do apocalyptic burning and degraded human beings on rubbish tips, too. Portuguese […]
So about those pantsula references in Beyonce’s latest video: Beyonce and her choreographer, Frank Gatson Jr, had seen a Mozambican group, Tofo Tofo, on Youtube. This is Gatson talking to MTV about Tofo Tofo, above in someone’s wedding video: We prepared a lot for it. We had seen something on YouTube; we had seen these […]
American R&B singer Beyonce has described the new video for her single “Run This World (Girls)” as “futuristic,” “electronic” and “African.” Of the overload of half-references in the video, some things came to mind: Pieter Hugo‘s hyena men (or rather, the hyenas on a leash) make an appearance, and so are the two pantsula dancers […]
Photographs are perceived to represent reality in their reference to a subject; their ability to create these physical, indexical connections to reality in viewers’ minds means that photography is often unquestioningly used as “visual recorder” or as a “documentarian” of socio-political experiences. When a PR audio-slideshow (in the Guardian) for an exhibit of images that document contemporary […]
A short video profile of the Johannesburg photographer, Sabelo Mlangeni, one of 17 South African photographers in “Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography“, showing from 12 April through 17 July this year at the Victoria and Alfred Museum’s Porter Gallery in London. It features work by photographers living and working in South Africa now. […]
