Goodman Gallery
20.07 - 24.08.2024
A history begins to unfold – images, text, photographs, video, newspaper scraps, drawings. Sue Williamson’s solo show at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, Short Stories in a Longer Tale, explored six moments in South and West African history. The works were divided according to era, each series with a unique visual language, showcasing Williamson’s artistic range. Preoccupied by history as an active, mnemonic exercise, Williamson swings easily between forms – embroidery, printmaking, photography and installation. The artist’s choice of media felt intentional, each serving a different purpose. But at times, the sheer volume of works was slightly overwhelming, and the viewer was pulled in and out of each historical era, almost too quickly.
The exhibition opened with All Our Mothers, a series of photographic portraits of South African female freedom fighters. Tucked in a corner of the opening space is a tribute to struggle activist Ray Alexander, with colour laser printed photographs framing the installation piece, A chair for Ray Alexander. Alexander was most well-known for her role as an anti-apartheid activist and trade unionist who helped draft the Women’s Charter. The installation featured a chair superimposed with an image of Alexander, complete with a cushion, and perched on a platform, the piece referencing her reputation for being a keen and attentive listener.
Sue Williamson, Short Stories in a Longer Tale, 2024.
Stories for Children featured embroidered drawings inspired by a colouring book bought at the Anglo-Boer War Museum (now known as the South African War) in the 1980s. The colouring book was designed to explain the horrors of the war to young Afrikaans-speaking children. The first panel depicts a pastoral scene: a family stands in front of their farmhouse, a sheep at their heels. Another image depicts soldiers with guns strapped to their chests, firing from behind rocks on a hillside. The panels were embroidered onto white organdie in black cotton, mirroring the labour of Boer women in concentration camps when they would make toys for their children. In the medium itself, Williamson draws from history, using the physicality of embroidery to transport the viewer to a different time.
This is true of all the series featured in Short Stories in a Longer Tale. Williamson’s journalistic background informs the way she engages with her art and, by extension, with her audience. In a 2023 interview with writer Charles Leonard for Mail & Guardian, Williamson discussed her journalism training in relation to her artistic practice, pointing out that the two crafts are slightly different. She said, “As an artist, I have more freedom… You’re not trying to encapsulate all the facts for your audience. You’re trying to give them a space to think through it a little bit and perhaps provoke them.” This is exactly what Short Stories in a Longer Tale managed to do – the viewer was presented with various sets of information from different eras in history and was allowed to make their own inferences about their significance.
While each series was cohesive and informative, the sheer volume of artistic explorations was at times difficult to engage with fully, particularly because each was set in a different time frame. The viewer was brought out of each era just as quickly as they were brought in. As such, it was difficult to ascertain exactly what Williamson wanted the viewer to gain by the end of the exhibition. The eras explored were sometimes worlds apart, the only similarity between the historical events being that they occurred in the same general region.
Sue Williamson, Short Stories in a Longer Tale, 2024.
The exhibition’s final section included two series, both interrogating dark chapters in South Africa’s past. In Cold Turkey: Stories of Truth and Reconciliation, a precursor to Williamson’s Truth Games series, the artist “tells the story of the horrific experiments Eugene de Kock carried out to test a cassette player that was also a bomb.” In Untitled (St James Massacre), low-res footage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, captured on a Sony Handycam, stuttered across the screen of a small TV set.
Grainy stills captured in greyscale and placed on the adjacent wall were underlined with text: “almost halfway through the service… / the last song item was taking place… / I saw two gunmen or two people come in /” The stills were not clear enough to tell exactly what is happening, but with the aid of these partial subtitles, the viewer can make their inferences. The last line reads, “I should have anger. But” – the rest of the sentence was absent, cut short. The lack of punctuation made me want to return to the beginning, to search for something else, anything else: “But almost halfway through the service…” The viewer is caught in a loop, forced to go back to the beginning to try and make sense of half-finished phrases. In this way, the viewer was encouraged to create a narrative out of the information that Williamson provided. This active engagement with history and memory affords a certain sense of agency, allowing for construction and amendment after the fact. This mirrored the series, Postcards from Africa, where Williamson redrew scenes from colonial photographic postcards. In each case, the artist removed the people who once posed stiffly in each frame, leaving suggestions in their wake: boy (12), girl (14), boy (11). History was rewritten, the story constructed out of fragmented parts.
Through six isolated artistic explorations, Williamson managed to create an honest and often critical portrait of a continent, a country, through the ages. The artworks themselves were almost journalistic in nature, being used as conduits for presenting historical information. Some details were left out intentionally, allowing the viewer to become an active participant in the construction of a shared story, a collective memory. That being said, it might have been helpful to include fewer works, across a more focused timeline and with more depth in each era. The relevance of an exhibition of this nature is perhaps debatable. On the one hand, Williamson managed to provide an overview of South and West Africa’s past, encapsulating each socio-political moment in what felt like bite-sized exhibitions. On the other hand, the curatorial intention behind Short Stories in a Longer Tale was not altogether clear.
Sue Williamson, A Chair for Ray Alexander, 1990-1992.
