Current Review(s)
The Endless Absence of Delio Jasse
Delio Jasse at SMAC ART GALLERY CAPE TOWNIn Portugal in 1974, a leftist coup d’etat replaced Salazar’s repressive, right-wing, traditionalist and pro-Catholic regime with a socialist democracy. One result was the immediate cessation of the prohibitively costly war waged against the liberation movements in Mozambique and Angola which, at one time, monopolized 40% of the national budget. The wars were hugely unpopular, both at home and abroad, and for years, those eligible for conscription avoided it by emigrating en masse. Nearly one million went to France, another million to the USA, and many hundreds of thousands to the rest of Europe, Venezuela and Brazil.
20 November 2014 - 17 January 2015
Listings(s)
'Ausencia Permanente'
Delio Jasse at SMAC ART GALLERY CAPE TOWN'Ausencia Permanente' is Angolan-born Delio Jasse’s first solo exhibition in South Africa. For this show, Jasse has chosen to present an installation produced on the occasion of his nomination for the BES Photo Award in 2014, a meditation on the transformation and (dis)ordering of the city of Luanda, its present and past inhabitants and their memories.
Throughout his production, Delio Jasse’s focus has been on imperial debris, on the ruins of the Portuguese empire, dispersed on the chaotic tables and spreads of merchants, antiquarians, second hand bookshops and flea markets around Lisbon, and on the busy streets and the bricoleured façades of Luanda’s architecture. Over the course of his many journeys and wanderings, Jasse has managed to assemble a stockpile of other people’s discarded memories and memoires; passports, visas, letters, albums, photographs, death notices – a body of colonial and migratory signifiers which he employs in his work. To this store of images and remnants of the colonial years of Portugal under António Oliveira de Salazar, from 1932 to 1968 or the period thereafter – which one might term that of 'imperial decay' – Jasse adds his own record of contemporary Angola; the multiform sites of less love for the bygone, those of disregard and abandonment which he sees in roads, buildings, compounds. These locations, these degraded environments, form a part of the psychic and material space in which Angolans or 'Luandinos' live and move today. They too are urban sites of 'imperial decay' in that they too contain the material and immaterial, the tangible and intangible, the visible and invisible traces of the waste of colonialism, that is, a type of refuse – material but also ideological and institutional – that degrades personhoods. This is evinced in the manner people are forced to live with the effects and affects of its damage.[i] Looking at Jasse’s images, we see slivers of spaces stubbornly inhabited by those displaced, requisitioned either to make way for commodity-life in the form of tourist consumption, mining or shopping malls, or occupied by those with nowhere else to turn. Unlike his romantic counterparts, Jasse’s does not look with an introspective, nostalgic gaze on ruins, he rejects their pathos and the rush of sentimental identification, looking instead to the lives of those living in or amongst those ruins, opting for a celebration of their survival.
20 November 2014 - 17 January 2015
