Medium: Single channel video Pages: Duration: 3:22
Type: Digital video Theme(s): Family history. Photo albums. Photomontage
Place publication: Johannesburg Publisher: The artist Exhibition 2017
Reference note: This project is an excavation of my family history through family albums. Sometimes we rely on the family photo album as a way to understand what family is meant to be. What we often land up with is a grouping of images that have been constructed, and perhaps do not account at all for the histories and memories that are connected with that album.
I am not suggesting that these photo albums are a lie but that they present a challenge of how we read into them. My work begins with my own family album and questions what has been omitted from this album, what memories are not been translated through the pictures, what role does a family photo album play in the present?
Family photographs are more than just a documentation of events that have occurred, it is a space for us to project what we can recall and perhaps a space to question and invent a new history per se. I am interested in how albums no longer have a fixed narrative but instead open us to reinterpret our past and perhaps this kind of reinterpretation, questions why we find family albums so important or perhaps we do not.
The more I researched my family history, it becomes apparent that family history remains a space of contradictions, it is a mixture of truth and fiction. Photo albums are arranged as if to tell life stories and testimonies and build identities, however the image is never ‘complete’ we are only presented with visual clues that allows our own imaginaries to further ‘complete’ the story.
More so in my exploration of my family album, I begin to find myself as an outsider trying to construct an archive, by rearranging images to complete a story, truth or fiction. Such archives do not reveal easy answers, for me it reveals that time can break apart and reconnect and not quite fit back into one another.
Exhibition notes: ‘Booknesses: Contemporary South African Artist's Books’.
FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg.
Curated by David Paton and Eugene Hon.
24 March - 5 May 2017
This work won the First Prize at the Sasol New Signatures Art Competition,