Pieter Hugo

Current Review(s)

'Life Less Ordinary' at Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham

Athi-Patra Ruga, Berni Searle, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo at Djanogly Art Gallery

While thematic constructs such as ‘identity’ and ‘performance’ are familiar paradigms within the South African art circuit, often even fatigued, the rise of racialised nationalism in the UK and Europe (witness the 'immigration' policies of the British National Party and Italy's Lega Nord) gives the Djanogly Art Gallery’s latest exhibition, 'A Life Less Ordinary', a politically incisive edge.

Curator Anna Douglas takes her conceptual cue from a seminal essay by Ash Amin on today’s charged politics of difference. Aptly titled 'The Racialisation of Everything', Amin’s essay explores how racial categorisation is founded on ‘fictions of difference made to count as the irreconcilables of essence, sometimes justified on grounds of biological difference, sometimes on grounds of so-called cultural incompatibility’. With its focus on contemporary South African art, the exhibition explores personal fictions set in dialogue with some of identity’s grandest narratives. The resultant conversations are at turns satirical and subversive, interrogative and whimsical.

05 September 2009 - 15 November 2009

Permanent Error

Pieter Hugo at STEVENSON in Cape Town

In what seems the accepted current format for South African photographers, a Pieter Hugo exhibition takes the form of an extended essay in which the photographer turns his camera on a subject of interest, and stays with it. In this way, his audience is provided with a long, slow look at a particular corner of the world, a specific group of people. This is very different from the approach of a Wolfgang Tillmans, say, a former Turner Prizewinner, whose antic camera seems to light on whatever catches his eye at any particular moment, constantly calling on the viewer to assess each new image for what it is.

Last time around, Hugo gave us his Nollywood series, a progression of extraordinary images in which actors in the Nigerian film industry posed in full cimematic costume for Hugo. The melodramatic situations were based on the kinds of plots built around ritual murder, voodoo worship and the belief in zombies.

Arresting, highly colourful and memorable, opening up fascinating narrative possibilities for the viewer, these were for me amongst Hugo’s strongest images. The criticism that the series reinforced negative images of Africa seemed to me misplaced: the series gave an insight into a film language about which not much is known in many parts of the world, and in so doing produced a number of striking images in gorgeous colour, worthy of their provenance. And the actors were doing what they always do anyway – posing in character for the camera in exchange for a fee.

29 July 2010 - 04 September 2010

No Country for Kin

Pieter Hugo at STEVENSON in Johannesburg

When Pieter Hugo gets played in a movie, I want him to be played by Tommy Lee Jones. The Tommy Lee Jones that looks and feels like a half-smoked cigarette. I want you to imagine a kind of laconic weariness. I want you to imagine him saying: 

“I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job – not to be glorious…You can say it’s my job to fight it but I don’t know what it is anymore. More than that, I don’t want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I’ll be part of this world.”

03 October 2013 - 23 November 2013

Student Review: Kin

Pieter Hugo at STEVENSON in Cape Town

This review was selected for publication from the Art Criticism course for Honours students at UCT's Michaelis School of Fine Art

Pieter Hugo is most well-known for his spectacular series such as 'The Hyena and Other Men' (2005-2007) that documented a group of nomadic Nigerian performers also known as gadawan kura (hyena handlers) who use tamed hyenas, baboons and pythons to entertain the public. While 'Nollywood' (2008) offered a commentary on the Nigerian film industry, 'Permanent Error' (2011) examined scavengers who survived out of discarded technology at a dump site in a Ghananian town.

In his new photographic show titled ‘Kin’ at Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, Hugo offers a challenging view of life in contemporary South Africa. The show exhibited concurrently in New York, Johannesburg and in Cape Town, and presents a more personal and contemplative narrative, alternating between public and intimate spaces – an exploration of South Africa through the integration of still life, landscapes, documentary and portraiture modes. The project has been created over a period of six years, starting when his wife fell pregnant with their first daughter. The pregnancy raised conflicting perspectives about the South African psychological landscape, with the expectations of a new family increasing pressure on him in a country with a fraught history and uncertain future.

As Hugo writes in a short essay about the exhibition, the project ‘Kin’ is ‘an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and [his] sense of being “colonial driftwood”’.  ‘How does one live in this society?’, he asks, ‘How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent does one have to? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? Before getting married and having children, these questions did not trouble me; now, they are more confusing. This work attempts to address these questions and to reflect on the nature of conflicting personal and collective narratives. I have deeply mixed feelings about being here. I am interested in the places where these narratives collide. "Kin" is an attempt at evaluating the gap between society’s ideals and its realities.’

As the title of the exhibition suggests, the artist’s narrative seems to be based on relationships, associations and connections, some based on biological kinship, others geographical. Hugo states that ‘South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and problematic place. Issues of race and cultural custodianship permeate every aspect of society here and the legacy of apartheid casts a long shadow…’ The artist depicts subjects and places of significance such as sites of  political importance, psychologically-charged spaces in people’s private homes, overcrowded townships, neglected mining areas and contested farmlands. Hence it’s a series that interrogates complex social, economic and political issues such as colonialism, the widening gap between the rich and poor, racial diversity, class and sexuality in South Africa.

The exhibition starts with photographs of people to whom the artist is closely related. There are photographs of his grandparents, his naked pregnant wife, as well as a portrait of the artist with his new-born baby and Ann Sallies, who Hugo refers to as the one ‘who worked for my parents and helped raise their children’. There are outstandingly vivid juxtapositions in the show. The artist’s portrait holding his baby shares a room with a gay married couple. The couple made headlines when they became the first gay couple to be married in South Africa, a country with a history of homophobic violence. The image of a beggar at a traffic light, a tattooed convict and a man carrying a bag of oranges reflect people who are victims of social exclusion and marginalisation regardless of the colour of their skin and geographical space; people who are striving for survival. For example the juxtaposition of Dainfern, an affluent suburb in Johannesburg with an aerial geometrical view of cramped Diepsloot Township, or Sowetan Sipho Ntsibande’s box of cigarettes and the photograph of a slab from the Voortrekker monument invokes a sense of history and the memory of colonialism and apartheid that led to the segregation of cities and relationships. The symbolism inherent here is that of the failed promises of hope by the post-apartheid government – failing to improve people’s lives and living conditions.

It can be inferred that by using photographs depicting everyday life that viewers are aware of, Hugo successfully projects South African socio-economic and political landscapes. However images such as that of a beggar at a traffic intersection and the one of a homeless man may be dismissed as exploitative and sensational for presenting his subjects as exoticised curiosities that are marketable in Western countries. Such criticism is as old as the introduction of photography as an art and I argue that, being a white South African photographer, he is aware of the problems of representation that his work may incur. The images have a high degree of precision and clarity of colour reflecting the conditions in which they were captured and as such they seem not to project schizophrenic and fractured ideas. In this way one may applaud Hugo for avoiding reducing his subjects to objects, but rather maintaining their dignity. So by using different genres of portraiture he gives the viewer a cross-section of the marginalisation that exists in South Africa.

Considering the magnitude of the show, the title ‘Kin’ does not really capture the theme of the exhibition for me. Out of the fifty-four works that make up the exhibition very few of them reveal kinship. For instance the Xhosa initiates may be wearing strikingly similar suits but that does not clearly define their kinship. Nevertheless, the concept of kinship, like identity, is fluid and flexible.

The exhibition was held on 3 October - 23 November 2013 at the Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.

03 October 2013 - 23 November 2013

Listings(s)

'Life Less Ordinary' at Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham

Athi-Patra Ruga, Berni Searle, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo at Djanogly Art Gallery

'Life Less Ordinary' considers fictions of categorization and difference - be it the idea of race, nationhood, ethnicity, sexuality, religion or belonging -explored by a range of contemporary artists from South Africa.

This exhibition brings together works of photography, performance, film and installation by a younger generation wishing to shake loose from the epic narrative of race to play with, stage, transcend, celebrate and deconstruct more complex and nuanced subjectivities.

Artists include Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Nandipha Mntambo, Steven Cohen, Dineo Bopape, Berni Searle and Andrew Putter.

05 September 2009 - 15 November 2009

Nollywood

Pieter Hugo at galleria e x t r a s p a z i o

Pieter Hugo exhibits his Nollywood series an exploration of the third largest film industry in the world, which releases onto the home video market approximately 1000 movies each year. Hugo’s vision of Nollywood’s interpretation of the world results in a gallery of hallucinatory and unsettling images.

The series depict situations clearly surreal but that could be real on a set.  In his images the boundaries between documentary and fiction become very fluid.

 

25 November 2009 - 09 January 2010

Hugo's 'Nollywood' in New York

Pieter Hugo at Yossi Milo Gallery

Yossi Milo Gallery follows up their 2008 showing of Pieter Hugo's
'The Hyena and Other Men' with a solo exhibition of the artist's  'Nollywood' photographic series.

25 February 2010 - 10 April 2010

'On Reality and Other Stories'

Pieter Hugo at Forest Centre Culturel, at BRASS

Hugo's first solo show in Belgium, this exhibition covers three bodies of photographic work: Looking Aside, the Hyaena Men, and Nollywood. Through these varied series, Pieter Hugo reveals the complexities and paradoxes of Africa, an ethnically diverse continent where traditions and beliefs blend with occidental influences inherited from colonialism. The digital era, with its disturbing manipulations of truth, confirms what Pieter Hugo is fully conscious of: that whenever we are faced with photography, there is that omnipresent but also creative doubt, stimulating us to forge new ways forward and to construct a lyrical universe complete with its own distinct features.

27 August 2010 - 26 November 2010

'Permanent Error'

Pieter Hugo at STEVENSON in Cape Town

For the past year Hugo has been photographing the people and landscape of an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. The area, on the outskirts of a slum known as Agbogbloshie, is referred to by local inhabitants as Sodom and Gomorrah, a vivid acknowledgment of the profound inhumanity of the place. When Hugo asked the inhabitants what they called the pit where the burning takes place, they repeatedly responded: 'For this place, we have no name'.

Their response is a reminder of the alien circumstances that are imposed on marginal communities of the world by the West's obsession with consumption and obsolesce. This wasteland, where people and cattle live on mountains of motherboards, monitors and discarded hard drives, is far removed from the benefits accorded by the unrelenting advances of technology.

29 July 2010 - 04 September 2010

'Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity'

Jo Ractliffe, Guy Tillim, Kay Hassan, Berni Searle, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Hentie van der Merwe, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Candice Breitz, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at The Walther Collection

The Walther Collection opens to the public on June 17, 2010 with 'Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity', introducing works from its African collection. Under the curatorial direction of Okwui Enwezor, the exhibition comprises a series of four projects filling all nine galleries in the three buildings of the new exhibition space in Burlafingen near Ulm, Southern Germany. The exhibition integrates the work of three generations of African artists and photographers with that of modern and contemporary German photography. This combination of African and German works will serve as a model for the kind of curatorial process that animates the character of the collecting program.

Works in the collection include those by Berni Searle, Candice Brietz, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Zanele Muholi, Hentie van der Merwe, David Goldblatt, Kay Hassan, Pieter Hugo, Guy Tillim, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Santu Mofokeng and Jo Ractliffe.

17 June 2010 - 17 October 2010

'Permanent Error'

Pieter Hugo at STEVENSON in Johannesburg

Pieter Hugo's compelling show of photographic images taken on a digital dump in Ghana shows at Brodie/Stevenson until mid-December. Hugo puts the focus on European countries' questionable practice of dumping digital waste in Africa.

The waste is sent ostensibly to help underdeveloped Africa bridge the digital divide; but instead the obsolete hardware gets pulled apart and melted down for its precious metals. The resulting dump on the outskirts of Agblogbloshie becomes an environment-scarring blight, contaminating the people forced to scavenge on it as much as it sustains them.

04 November 2010 - 15 December 2010

'Breaking News: Contemporary Photography from the Middle East and Africa'

Bob Gosani , Guy Tillim, David Goldblatt, Jodie Bieber, Daniel Naude, Pieter Hugo and Mikhael Subotzky at Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena

'Breaking News' presents the third group of acquisitions for the international contemporary photography, art film and video collection of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena. Curated by Filippo Maggia, this major survey features 21 artists from 12 countries. 'As the title suggests,' says Maggia, 'the idea for this exhibition is to use a selection of emblematic works that recently became part of the Fondazione di Modena collection to shed light on a part of the world that only makes the news with conflicts and bloody events. "Breaking News" is the journalism launch - typical of TV news - that announces the latest news'. Dominated for more than a century by the views induced by colonialism, Africa now expresses a variety of creative voices investigating not only the legacies of the past but also the complexities of the present.

28 November 2010 - 13 March 2011

'Nollywood'

Pieter Hugo at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts

They say Nigeria's Nollywood is the world's third largest film industry. It releases up to a thousand titles a year onto the local home-video market. Produced and marketed in the space of a week, they use cheap equipment, basic scripts, actors cast the day of shooting, and real locations. While drawing on genres and typologies drawn from Hollywood, Nollywood movies are a rare instance of mass-media self-representation. The stories-including tales of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery, and prostitution-speak to the experiences and values of their local audiences. The narratives are overdramatic, and deprived of happy endings. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted.

South African photographer Pieter Hugo became intrigued by Nollywood's fictional worlds, where the everyday and the unreal intertwine. He asked a team of actors and assistants to recreate Nollywood myths and symbols as if they were on movie sets and photographed them. The resulting images recreate the stereotypical characters that typify Nollywood productions, including mummies, satanic demons, and zombies, all casually posed in the backlots of Enugu. 'Nollywood' is on loan from the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

05 February 2011 - 27 March 2011

'Possible Cities: Africa in Photography and Video'

Guy Tillim, Pieter Hugo and Sabelo Mlangeni at Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery

The exhibition 'Possible Cities: Africa in Photography and Video' includes photo installations by Sammy Baloji, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni, and Guy Tillim, and video installations by Salem Mekuria and married artists and collective IngridMwangiRobertHutter. Curated by Mellon Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Ruti Talmor, the exhibition seeks to complicate representations of Africa through a set of works on cities as sites of convergence of multiple pasts and futures and as collections of changing and changeable sites that may or may not be geographically contiguous.

18 March 2011 - 29 April 2011

'ARS 11'

Mary Sibande, Pieter Hugo, Steven Cohen, Kudzanai Chiurai, Nandipha Mntambo and Andrew Putter at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

'ARS 11' is a major international art event filling Helsinki's Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art with artworks, performances, screenings, discussions and workshops, and extending to eight cities in Finland as well as to Stockholm, Sweden. Investigating Africa in contemporary art, the exhibition includes not only artists living in Africa, but also those who live outside the continent; artists of African descent as well as Western artists who address African issues in their work. The exhibition features some 300 works by a total of 30 artists, including Mary Sibande, Kudzanai Chiurai, Nandipha Mntambo, Andrew Putter, Steven Cohen and Pieter Hugo.

15 April 2011 - 27 November 2011

'The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989'

Ruth Sacks, Pieter Hugo, Zander Blom, Meschac Gaba and Moshekwa Langa at ZKM - Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

Globalization as a phase of geopolitical vicissitude of the world signifies a change in art and its circumstances of production and the possibilities of its distribution and perception. At the same time, artists and most of all the institutions of art – large-scale exhibitions, museums, the market – are confronted with the question of how far art can be and has to be thought of as global – and how this affects their own modes of production. With the aid of documentary materials and artistic standpoints, the exhibition 'The Global Contemporary' will demonstrate how globalization, with its dominant market mechanisms on the one hand, and its utopias of connectivity and liberalness on the other, influences the different spheres of art production and reception.

17 September 2011 - 05 February 2012

'For a Sustainable World': Recontres de Bamako 2011

Jo Ractliffe, Lien Botha, Brent Meistre, David Goldblatt, Hasan and Husain Essop, Daniel Naude, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni and Tracey Rose at Bamako Photography Biennial

In 2010, many African countries celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their independence. For many, this event was the time to take stock of national achievements and to look critically at political and social structures, as well as the distribution of wealth. For these 'Rencontres', we invited photographers and videographers to witness, to denounce, but also to identify areas for action, evidence of resistance or prevention, and the possibilities for the construction of a sustainable world. The variety of themes and languages ??chosen by the artists provides a survey of the diverse artistic production today on the continent and in the diaspora.

The Pan-African Exhibit, in the temporary exhibition rooms of the National Museum of Mali, brings together 45 photographers and 10 videographers from 27 countries, including a number from South Africa. Other South African artists, including Tracey Rose, appear in 'A World Beyond the World': The Sindika Dokolo Collection, and there is also a 'Monograph' exhibition of David Goldblatt's work.

01 November 2011 - 01 January 2012

Paris Photo

Jodi Bieber, Joel Andrianomearisoa, Billy Monk, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Andrew Tshabangu, Cedric Nunn, Pieter Hugo, Mikhael Subotzky, Viviane Sassen, Moshekwa Langa, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at Grand Palais

The annual Paris Photo will celebrate its 15th anniversary at the Grand Palais, featuring 117 galleries from some 23 countries presenting the best of 19th century, modern and contemporary photography in the heart of the French capital. This year's special focus is on African photography from Bamako to Cape Town, with several South African artists in the spotlight in the main venue as well as on other shows around the city (such as the skyroof of the Gare du Nord station). South African galleries  STEVENSON, Goodman Gallery, Bailey Seippel, and Gallery MOMO will be exhibiting.

10 November 2011 - 13 November 2011

'Permanent Error'

Pieter Hugo at MAXXI - National Museum of XXI Century Arts

Pieter Hugo's apocalyptic portraits of a high-tech dump in Ghana feature in the Carlo Scarpa Room on the ground floor of Rome's MAXXI - National Museum of XXI century arts.

01 December 2011 - 29 January 2012

'This Must Be The Place'

Pieter Hugo at The Hague Museum of Photography

The South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s monumental photographs, centred around contemporary Africa, are now well known around the world, catalysed by recent awards including the KLM Paul Huf award in 2008 and a nomination for the 2012 the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. The Hague Museum of Photography will be the first museum to exhibit a comprehensive survey of Hugo’s work from 2003-2011. Together with many previously unseen works, the exhibition will include a curated selection of his most well-known series: The Hyena & Other Men, the bizarre Nollywood and the striking Permanent Error. His impressive portraits tell personal stories about recurring themes throughout his oeuvre, namely those people who inhabit the margins of society in sub-Saharan Africa.

03 March 2012 - 20 May 2012

III Moscow International Biennial of Young Art 2012

Athi Patra-Ruga, Lerato Shadi, Pieter Hugo, Mikhael Subotzky and Nandipha Mntambo at Various venues

The 'III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art 2012' focuses on a young generation of artists aged up to 35 years. Titled 'Under A Tinsel Sun' and laid out as a multimedia project, it portrays the heterogeneity of subjects, languages and styles which are so urgent in this generation, and at the same time looks into the content-related positioning of these artists born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, as well as into the conditions for their development.

'Under A Tinsel Sun' assumes that, despite the cultural, economic and social differences that may exist between the participants from different countries, there is a common factor in the impossibility of locating oneself by belonging to certain peer groups (whether in the ideological or in the artistic sense).

Cultural science often refers to this as an "almost desperate isolation" (Wolfgang Kaschuba), as the final state of a development in the field of art that had already begun in the mid-1970s, manifesting itself in the end of the historical avant-gardes and in their reassessment as part of a dominant canon. The collapse of ideologies at the end of the 1980s and the dawning of the post-ideological age both play a role within this mesh.

In this state of infinite possibilities, free decision and development and in the absence of a communal "we", the self-positioning of the (artistic) individual becomes the pressing imperative of the present. With the increasing medialization of the world the long established polarity between reality and virtuality gives way to the consciousness that "reality" as such is constructed, subjective and fragmented.

This realization becomes the drive for the artists' self-positioning and for their production of works that no longer describe the phenomena surrounding them as "objective", but that aspire to catalyze a multidimensional and alternative perception of the world. Poetic shifts, emotionality and subjective appropriation are the tools which the artists of this generation operate with so as to faciliate new ways of seeing.

Kathrin Becker

01 July 2012 - 31 August 2012

'Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive'

Santu Mofokeng, Andrew Putter, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi, Candice Breitz and Zwelethu Mthethwa at The Walther Collection Project Space

Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive

A three-part exhibition series on photography from Southern Africa, Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive presents rarely before seen portraits, albums, cartes de visite, and books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The exhibitions stage a dialogue between ethnographic visions and contemporary engagements with archival imagery and feature recent work African and African American artists. Distance and Desire offers new perspectives on the archive, reimagining its poetic and political dimensions, its diverse histories, and its changing meanings. The series is curated by Tamar Garb.

Exhibitions

The Walther Collection Project Space, New York Part I: Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-Cronin September 13 - November 17, 2012

The opening exhibition juxtaposes A.M. Duggan-Cronin's 'The Bantu Tribes of South Africa' with Santu Mofokeng's 'The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950.' Duggan-Cronin's eleven-volume study, published between 1928-1954, is renowned and contested for preserving an ethnographic vision of African heritage. In contrast, 'The Black Photo Album,' created in 1997 by contemporary South African artist Santu Mofokeng, is an archive of pictures - commissioned by black South Africans in the early twentieth century - and stories about the subjects, challenging fixed ideas of the "native type" most often associated with photographic representations of Africans.

Gallery Talks:

Jennifer Bajorek on Santu Mofokeng September 25, 2012 at 7pm

Jennifer Bajorek is a lecturer in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University.??John Peffer on Portraiture in South Africa ?October 23, 2012 at 7pm ?John Peffer is Associate Professor of Contemporary and Nonwestern Art History at Ramapo College.

Part II: Contemporary Reconfigurations

November 30, 2012 - March 9, 2013

This exhibition centers on photography and video art by contemporary African and African American artists who engage critically with the ethnographic archive by parodying, replaying, exposing, and dialoguing with its pictorial tropes and traditions. A stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era may provide material for an irreverent reworking, satirical performance, or elegiac reenactment in another. Addressing how the archive - broadly understood as an accumulation of representations, images and objects - figures in the practices of contemporary artists in Africa, the exhibition features recent work by Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, Samuel Fosso, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Andrew Putter, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Gallery Talk:

Awam Amkpa on Contemporary African Photography February 12, 2013 at 7pm

Awam Amkpa is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

Part III: Poetics and Politics March

22 - May 18, 2013

A presentation of vintage portraits, books, albums, postcards, and cartes de visite, this exhibition reveals the complexity of the African archive, showing works produced in the 1870s to the early twentieth century. Focusing on the pictorial languages deployed by photographers and the contexts in which images are made to circulate, both historically and today, these portraits and figure studies depict Africans predominantly through the filters of European cameras and mentalities. The images make visible both the ideological frameworks that prevailed during the colonial period in South Africa as well as the extraordinary skill of photographers working in the studio and the landscape.

Gallery Talks:

Tamar Garb on 'Distance and Desire' March 23, 2013 at 3pm

Tamar Garb is the Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London.

Hlonipha Mokoena and Cheryl Finley in conversation on The South African Photo Album April 9, 2013 at 7pm

Hlonipha Mokoena is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Cheryl Finley is Associate Professor of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University.

Symposium Encounters with the African Archive

November 10, 2012, 10am - 5pm

New York University, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East

Coinciding with the exhibition series, The Walther Collection, in collaboration with New York University and University College London, will present a symposium to explore issues raised by the collection's archive of African photography. This one-day event brings together leading international scholars to exchange, debate and open up the categories often used to describe historic photographs of Africans: colonial, ethnographic, anthropological, artistic. The symposium will provide a space for rethinking the African archive in relation to the concerns of contemporary critics and artists. Participants include Elizabeth Edwards (Durham University), Tamar Garb (University College London), Christraud Geary (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Michael Godby (University of Cape Town), Erin Haney (George Washington University), Salah Hassan (Cornell University), Hlonipha Mokoena (Columbia University), Riason Naidoo (South African National Gallery), Gabi Ncobo (University of the Witswatersrand), Chika Okeke-Agulu (Princeton University), John Peffer (Ramapo College), and Deborah Willis (New York University).

Free and open to the public. To register, email invitation@walthercollection.com.

Catalogue

The exhibition program will be accompanied by the publication of a major scholarly catalogue, 'Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive', edited by Tamar Garb and Artur Walther. Released in March 2013 to coincide with the opening of "Poetics and Politics," the catalogue, co-published with Steidl, will include all exhibited visual material as well as new research generated by the symposium's debate and discussion.

Exhibition

The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany

Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive June 8, 2013 - May 18, 2014

The culmination of the exhibition series will be an expanded presentation of Parts I, II, and III of 'Distance and Desire' at The Walther Collection's museum campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany. For the first time the exhibition will be shown in its entirety, complete with additional contemporary works that will broaden the dialogues and juxtapositions staged in New York.

13 September 2012 - 17 May 2015

'Kin'

Pieter Hugo at STEVENSON in Johannesburg

Stevenson present a solo exhibition by Pieter Hugo, titled 'Kin'. This new photographic series will show across both of Stevenson's galleries, premiering in Johannesburg and opening two weeks later in Cape Town.

'Kin' is a bittersweet perspective on Hugo's homeland of South Africa. It is a meditation on the ideals of home, both familial and humanistic. It explores the tenuous ties that both bind us to and repel us from others.

Over the past eight years Hugo has turned his eye on cramped townships, contested farmlands and abandoned mining areas; psychologically charged still lifes in people's homes; sites of political significance; drifters and the homeless; his pregnant wife, and his daughter moments after her birth; the domestic servants who have worked for the Hugo family over three generations. The series alternates between intimate and public spaces, with particular emphasis on the growing disparity between rich and poor, and reveals Hugo's deeply conflicted feelings about his home. It confronts complex issues of colonisation, racial diversity and economic disparity. 'Kin' endeavours to locate his young family in a country with a fraught history and an uncertain future.

Hugo describes the 'Kin' project as:

 

'an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being 'colonial driftwood' ... South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and problematic place. It is a very violent society and the scars of colonialism and apartheid still run very deep. Issues of race and cultural custodianship permeate every aspect of society, and the legacy of forced racial segregation casts a long shadow ... How does one live in this society? How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent should one try? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? Before getting married and having children, these questions did not trouble me; now, they are more confusing. This work attempts to address these questions and to reflect on the nature of conflicting personal and collective narratives. I have deeply mixed feelings about being here. I am interested in the places where these narratives collide. 'Kin' is an attempt at evaluating the gap between society's ideals and its realities.'

03 October 2013 - 23 November 2013

Kin

Pieter Hugo at STEVENSON in Cape Town

STEVENSON is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Pieter Hugo, titled Kin. This new photographic series will show across both of Stevenson's galleries, premiering in Johannesburg and opening two weeks later in Cape Town.

Kin is a bittersweet perspective on Hugo's homeland of South Africa. It is a meditation on the ideals of home, both familial and humanistic. It explores the tenuous ties that both bind us to and repel us from others.

Over the past eight years Hugo has turned his eye on cramped townships, contested farmlands and abandoned mining areas; psychologically charged still lifes in people's homes; sites of political significance; drifters and the homeless; his pregnant wife, and his daughter moments after her birth; the domestic servants who have worked for the Hugo family over three generations. The series alternates between intimate and public spaces, with particular emphasis on the growing disparity between rich and poor, and reveals Hugo's deeply conflicted feelings about his home. It confronts complex issues of colonisation, racial diversity and economic disparity. Kin endeavours to locate his young family in a country with a fraught history and an uncertain future.

03 October 2013 - 23 November 2013

'Apartheid & After'

Jo Ractliffe, David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Daniel Naude, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni and Mikhael Subotzky at Huis Marseille

Huis Marseille in Amsterdam presents 'Apartheid & After', a photography exhibition taking the work of David Goldblatt as its starting point and focusing on his successors, among them Jo Ractliffe, Guy Tillim, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni and Daniel Naudé.

The exhibition 'Apartheid & After' reveals how powerfully the recent past can colour our perception of the present; this theme runs through the work of all twelve participating photographers after 1990. However powerful the individual images may be, this is photography with a hidden agenda – in a positive sense of the word. Knowledge of the past brings the present into sharp focus, and vice versa. It’s a tightrope act. Being a photographer in South Africa demands a sober, articulate, and skilled approach to the country’s burden of memory, trauma, and resulting guilt, as well as to the mysterious colouring and extravagant beauty of Africa so eagerly exploited by today’s tourist industry.
The exhibition 'Apartheid & After', which is based on an idea by David Goldblatt, aims to display the quality, diversity and dynamism of contemporary South African photography to a Dutch audience; there are, after all, historic links between the two countries. Today, twenty years after South Africa’s first-ever free elections were held in 1994, Goldblatt is not alone in having a solid international reputation; he is joined by Guy Tillim, Jo Ractliffe, Santu Mofokeng, Zanele Muholi and Pieter Hugo, as well as by a new cohort of younger photographers such as Mikhael Subotzky, Daniel Naudé, and Sabelo Mlangeni. The dynamism and breadth of contemporary South African photography is due in no small part to the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, where – under John Fleetwood’s leadership – many remarkable talents have emerged over a comparatively short period of time.

‘It is astonishing to think that until the beginning of the 1990s, merely two decades ago, modern and contemporary African photography was largely in the shadows.’ Okwui Enwezor in ‘Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity: Contemporary African Photography from the Walther Collection’, Steidl 2013 p.23.

The show includes work by: Paul Alberts, Hugh Exton, David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, Santu Mofokeng, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi, Daniel Naudé, Jo Ractliffe, Mikhael Subotzky, Guy Tillim, Paul Weinberg, Graeme Williams and the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg

15 March 2014 - 08 June 2014

'Kin'

Pieter Hugo at Fundacio Foto Colectania

The Foto Colectania Foundation Pieter Hugo's exhibition ‘Kin’ for the first time in Europe, a bittersweet perspective on the artist's native country, South Africa. The exhibition, which will be accompanied by the homonymous book recently published by Aperture, is a coproduction between the Foto Colectania Foundation  and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris.

Created over the past eight years, Pieter Hugo's series Kin confronts complex issues of colonization, racial diversity and economic disparity in Hugo's homeland of South Africa. These subjects are common to the artist's past projects in Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Botswana; however, this time, Hugo's attention is focused on his conflicted relationship with the people and environs closest to home.

Kin is the artist's personal exploration of South Africa through landscapes, portraits and still life photography. Hugo depicts locations and subjects of personal significance, such as cramped townships, contested farmlands, abandoned mining areas and sites of political influence, as well as psychologically charged still lives in people's homes and portraits of drifters and the homeless. Hugo also presents intimate portraits of his pregnant wife, his daughter moments after her birth and the domestic servant who worked for three generations of Hugo's family. Alternating between private and public spaces, with a particular emphasis on the growing disparity between rich and poor, Kin is the artist's effort to locate himself and his young family in a country with a fraught history and an uncertain future.

Hugo describes the Kin project as 'an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being ‘colonial driftwood' ... South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and problematic place. It is a very violent society and the scars of colonialism and Apartheid run deep. Issues of race and cultural custodianship permeate every aspect of society here and the legacy of Apartheid casts a long shadow ... How does one live in this society? How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent does one have to? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? Before getting married and having children, these questions did not trouble me; now, they are more confusing. This work attempts to address these questions and to reflect on the nature of conflicting personal and collective narratives. I have deeply mixed feelings about being here. I am interested in the places where these narratives collide. Kin is an attempt at evaluating the gap between society's ideals and its realities.'

The Kin series is also reflected in a book about to be published by the prestigious New York publisher Aperture. Pieter Hugo will present at first at Foto Colectania in September.

18 September 2014 - 10 December 2014