‘Against Time’ examines photographs usage in documentation and representation of time and space. Agreeably, photographs do not offer a clear picture of history, or of the present. Instead the fragmented and interpretative nature of images disallows their content to offer clear and linear understandings of time, and of space. Following two decades of democracy in South Africa, there are questions about how the past keeps moving into the present, and persists to be part of the future.
These lingering pasts and desired futures have created spaces for new identities and new ways of seeing. This exhibition seeks to unpack the factors that invent these new identities and ways of seeing with in and around urban environs. Addressed subject matter includes socio-economic positioning, cultural shifts toward popular cultures; globalisation and digital advances of cultural production. Further ideas to be visited are post-colonial re-readings of relics throughout our cities and spaces, and the role of transitions and transformations within this newly envisioned environments.
This group exhibition foregrounds the ways in which contemporary South African photographers engage ideas of time in relation to the nation’s two decades since democracy (1994-2014). This work is drawn from the Tierney Fellowship’s programme, a partnership between the Market Photo Workshop, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town and the Wits School of Arts, which has supported talented emerging photographers since 2008. Featured photographers include Ashley Walters, Juan Orrantia, Mack Magagane, Nobukho Nqaba, Paul Samuels and Sipho Gongxeka.
