Wits Art Museum
27.03 - 29.06.2024

Walking through Bettina Malcomess’ Sentimental Agents, at the Wits Art Museum (WAM), I am overcome with a feeling of isolation. In many ways, this mirrors the character featured in Malcomess’ films – a wanderer who travels through time, seeking answers. The artist writes, “Sentimental Agents is a series of moving image works embodying the entanglements of cinema within the nervous system of empire, an immersive information field of signals, light, sound and transmission.” The exhibition is part of a years-long exploration of cinema during the South African War, where Malcomess uses found objects, sculpture, drawing, and film to take the viewer on a journey through time. The works seek to critique the colonial frameworks through which history is often told and demonstrate the ways in which the past continues to haunt the present.

The exhibition is a collection of things long forgotten. Malcomess makes it clear that “[t]he work does not recycle archival footage nor historical images of the War’s biopolitical violence. The cinematic language instead embodies a colonial operationalisation of the nervous system by empire, one which marks, damages and marginalises black, feminine, queer, animal and nervous bodies.” In this way, the exhibition serves as a museum of both real and imagined states of being, homing in on one aspect of colonialism’s past in Africa.  

Glass cases filled with photographs and books stand as islands in a sea of empty space. Accompanying these archival cases are sculptures made of found objects — a lamp, an old film reel, and a collection of broken smartphones plastered on a wooden board. This combination of ancient and modern technology speaks to the liminality of time that is central to this exhibition, and the viewer experiences multiple eras at once.  

The exhibition’s main feature is a short film detailing the journey of an unnamed character, the ‘sentimental agent’, through Boer War historical sites. The character suffers from narcolepsy, a neurological condition characterised by random fits of daytime sleepiness. She is shown falling asleep at a café, while climbing over a fence, in a war museum, and while filming at the South African War Monument. These fits resemble a kind of haunting, the character being overcome by something the viewer cannot see. She narrates the film silently, her words appearing on the screen as subtitles.  Some of the shorter films seem ancient, shot on old film reels with grainy images and greyscale tones, but they were actually captured in the present day. Once again, the viewer is placed in a liminal space – between eras, between histories. 

At the grounds of a white concentration camp near Bethulie, a monument staunchly marks the ground as a historical site. During the Boer War, British forces in South Africa fought against two Afrikaner nations (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) for minority rule. During this time, concentration camps were introduced as a method of containment. Displaced from their homes, Boer women and children were kept in camps and suffered terrible living conditions. By the end of the war, over 26,000 Boer women and children had died as a result. Concentration camps for African people were also created, and black men were forced to fight on both sides of the war on account of major mines closing down. The camps were thus filled with women, children and the infirm, and the official death toll is often theorised to be higher than what was recorded. The character changes her t-shirt to one that reads, ‘Tomboys don’t cry,’ and anoints the ground with condensed milk – at once a symbol of Afrikaans heritage and a reference to the types of goods people could access during the war. The town’s resident, a self-appointed historian, shows her around. The character says: “He shows me a photograph of the archaeological diggings,” some of which are crushed cans of condensed milk. She notes that for every white camp, there was a camp of equal proportions for black people. The latter sites are not graced with epic sundial monuments, and no graves mark the lives that ended there. The memory of what happened lies in the soil instead, haunting those who choose to forget. Malcomess writes: “I don’t find answers, just history told in a series of unfinished sentences.”  

The artist seems to invite a reading of the works through the lens of hauntology. Specifically, the kind of hauntology that Jacques Derrida first described in his book, Specters of Marx, which speaks to the idea that elements of the past make themselves known in the present and come to foreshadow the future, much in the manner of ghosts. The sentimental agent becomes the excavator, showing viewers what would have otherwise gone unnoticed and forgotten. She visits other sites of historical significance, this time to defunct cinemas in Johannesburg and Accra. The first is His Majesty’s Theatre, an old cinema in central Johannesburg. The cinema is mostly intact, its yawning hall lying dormant in the bowels of another building, the doors and windows bricked off. By contrast, the Opera Cinema in Accra has become engorged with boxes after being converted into a lighting warehouse. The spectral remains of these ancient buildings are reminders of a particular history. 

Malcomess seems engaged in a process of what Colin Sterling calls critical heritage practice, and she becomes a vessel for a kind of practical hauntology. The artist forces us to contend with and acknowledge the ghostly aspects of history which continue to haunt the present. In his essay, Becoming Hauntologists: A New Model for Critical-Creative Heritage Practice, Sterling states that “both the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’ are to be understood in this way, as specters that haunt the present in their very non-being.” Malcomess’ art practice is therefore mnemonic, aiding the viewer in an exercise of memory excavation, a process which is enhanced by the archival curatorial style. Found objects act as artefacts of a colonial past that is no longer, but which continues to preoccupy our present reality.

Notes

The exhibition forms part of Bettina Malcomess’ PhD in Film Studies at Kings College London —the result of 7 years of archival and field research. The show opened with a first iteration on 26 March and will lead to the addition of a final film in May. The exhibition will have an active public programme of interventions and conversations that respond to the resonances between this war history and our contemporary moment.

Exhibition dates: 27 March – 29 June 2024.