Whitechapel Gallery
12.06 - 01.09.2024
The first thing you see when you walk into Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free! A Retrospective 1970 – 2023 are the paintings, which is almost obvious, but it seems worth stating. Major bodies of work have been collected and assembled for this exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, his first, organised by the Whitechapel with the Sharjah Art Foundation, and curated here by Salah M. Hassan in collaboration with Gilane Tawadros and Cameron Foote. Some of these series are being shown for the first time in years and years – the Zulu series, the Korabra series, whole lines of inquiry you can watch unfold in front of you. And what paintings: Jantjes’s technical skill is astonishing, running the gamut from whorled and ancient surfaces, crusted with sand and muck and stuff, to the earlier work — made after he left South Africa for Germany — all side-eyed arrangements of subjects carefully positioned and even more carefully rendered. Rainbow, baboon, Cape Dutch gable, map of the stars, person, ship. There are sculptures, too, small ones in ceramic and hand-carved wax, sitting just so, on little shelves, waxen and simple.
Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free! A Retrospective 1970–2023, Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, 2024.Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery / Photo: Damian Griffiths
Early on in this exhibition, you understand Jantjes as a printmaker, with all of the attendant meticulousness and talent for interpolation it requires. In School Days and Nights – made in 1977, in the aftermath of the Soweto Uprisings, an event which Jantjes returns to in this exhibition again and again – he positions figures and gestures from press photographs alongside imagined sitters, their silhouettes poised, about to slam into action. His talent for this kind of sampling and collage is a printerly way of working and also describes, in some way, the sensation of looking closely at reported violence and being unable to believe it. Or, maybe, the sensation of being able to believe it. It’s difficult to say.
Gavin Jantjes, School Days and Nights, 1977
His relationship with the British art world began in 1976 with the exhibition of A South African Colouring Book at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, and by the time of his work as both exhibiting artist and co-curator in the Whitechapel’s 1986 From Two Worlds Jantjes was an established voice of dissidence against the South African state, who banned him in earnest. Later in the exhibition is an image of him looking thoughtful and diligent in photographer – and fellow South African in exile – George Hallett’s studio, by which time he had left Cape Town for good, and was making a life elsewhere. The gash – of leaving the place where you are from – is part of To Be Free! as much as any of his subjects, hovering in the corner of your eye, and why shouldn’t it? On the first floor is a room of prints, mostly screenprints with collage, some with three-dimensional pieces attached: raffia rope, tissue paper ribbons. Again you get the sense of Jantjes as a very technically skilled printmaker, with the archival impulse that often goes hand-in-hand; collecting phrases, images, shards and pieces of South Africa, carefully arranging them on the positive and then the page, and their refusal to make sense. Prominent among the prints is a work consisting almost entirely of newspaper clippings relating to South Africa’s attempts to quash any kind of resistance (City Lates, 1976). Jantjes’s careful work here, of trying to draw up some kind of account or taxonomy of violence against protesting civilians from afar, is devastating in its simplicity. A youth lies dead in the township of Alexandra. Safety for children. Guerrillas killed.
Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free! A Retrospective 1970–2023, Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, 2024.Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery / Photo: Damian Griffiths
Like many others, I first came to know of Jantjes through his South African Colouring Book, his suite of twelve photographic screenprints exploring the twinned idiosyncrasies and horrors of apartheid through combining press photography of the struggle with the state’s official ‘definitions’ of each race – and, poignantly, Jantjes’ own pass, classifying him as coloured. On each page is a careful little row of six colours like a row of new pencils, waiting to be used. And when was the last time you saw the full Colouring Book portfolio, if ever? Oft-invoked, its physical presence in the world is a bit more slippery, and it is a rare treat to see the prints in their fullness. Mounted carefully on card and laid out under glass, these leave the domain of ‘artwork’ and become, instead, something a bit more sideways: tool, map, instruction, activity, relic. I was struck by the solemnity with which people approached these images at the exhibition’s opening, conversations ringing out, stopping abruptly and a hush descending. The shock of these works is still most precisely located in their starkness: colour this whites only. Colour these blacks white. Colour this labour dirt cheap. What else is there to say? Tucked up the stairs, in the Whitechapel’s less public galleries, the work remains hypnotically frank and biting in its critique.
The newer paintings – the Exogenic series and then Witney, Sharjah and Kirstenbosch – date from 2017 to 2023 and are being shown in this exhibition for the first time. They are an about-face from Jantjes’ precise works on paper: big paintings with bigger swoops of colour, fluid shapes and canvases which almost seem to change colour when you look at them from the corner of your eye. Made between his home in Oxfordshire and residencies in Sharjah, this upstairs section is hushed and holy, like a chapel, or even better, a studio. Here the pace slows, and moving from the room of prints the exhibition falters a bit, becomes less sure of itself. There’s relief, too – the scale of these works after the density of the room of prints is like watching Jantjes exhale, and you can almost watch the muscles in his arms relax as gestures and marks become looser, more diffuse, more interested in the quality of sunlight and its effects on colour. Newer series like Kirstenbosch retain the pang of homesickness characteristic of all his work. There’s also a film produced during the show’s first iteration, at Sharjah Art Foundation: I walked in as Jantjes receives an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts London and reads from Billy Taylor’s ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free’, whose closing line lends itself to the exhibition’s title.
Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free! A Retrospective 1970–2023, Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, 2024.Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery / Photo: Damian Griffiths
To Be Free! is a big show, a serious retrospective with all of the attendant encyclopaedic curatorial impulses, and it suffers a bit from its size and changes in pace. I’m most drawn in by the Whitechapel archives, which have been activated (that buzzword!) to varying degrees of success when I’ve visited before, and are given over here to Jantjes’ dizzying curatorial output. Shelves are full of ephemera and publications: here is Jantjes on the steps at the University of Cape Town in 1969, looking somehow both solemn and cheerful; a year later here he is in Germany, having left on a scholarship. Three years later, in 1973, he receives political asylum, and later moves to England, and then Norway. His life in Europe – his life in exile, I should say – is characterised by huge reserves of energy, lectureships and curatorial posts, major exhibitions of contemporary artists, work for the UN and for Arts Council England, trusteeships and advisory boards.
Of these archival materials, perhaps most compelling are the catalogues Jantjes worked on whilst curator of Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, which offer a pleasing timeline of exhibition and catalogue design in Europe from the 1990s to the 2010s, all squared-off sans serif fonts and interesting crops. It is always good to realise one is fluent in a previously unknown and specific aesthetic language, and I was delighted by how clearly datable these pamphlets and publications were. In the wider context of the room – and maybe even the whole show – Jantjes’s life and practice began to synthesise, and throughlines between ways of working became clear. Such is the work of a successful retrospective, drawing lines and tying bits of string to different pins. There is, of course, a particular valence in the idea of the archive in South Africa, and the use of the archive post-apartheid, which I won’t attempt to summarise here. But I’m always minded to quote archivist Verne Harris on reckoning with the large-scale destruction of public records by the apartheid government between 1990 and 1993. Archival practice, he says, can and should be ‘an exercise in releasing meanings, tending mystery, opening the archive.’ Good words to hold close in this exhibition, I think, and even better to hold close when you leave it.
