59 quotes found
"I often wished during those years that I could be a lyricist with a camera. [...] I took great delight in [Edward Weston's] and many other photographers’ work. I envied them the freedom to photograph a landscape apparently without concern for the implications of its possession."
"...photographers shouldn’t confuse their response to the politics of the country with their role as photographers."
"During those years color seemed too sweet a medium to express the anger, disgust and fear that apartheid inspired, ..."
"My father regarded nationalism, including Zionism, as an evil and although he never attempted to convince me of his views, his logic, here, was inescapable."
"I’m a plodder. If you look back at my work, it’s a straight-line graph with a few bumps. I’ve been doing the same thing for 60 years. Today I’m doing exactly what I was doing in the years of apartheid. I’m looking critically at the processes taking place in my country."
"Differences are settled by talk. You don’t threaten with guns. You don’t threaten with fists. You don’t burn. You don’t destroy. You talk. These actions of the students are the antithesis of democratic action. For me, the essential issue was that [Cape Town University] was in breach of my freedom of expression. I couldn’t leave my work there… to leave my work there would be to endorse that policy."
"I cannot give up myself and my soul simply because I need some exposure."
"If I wait for someone else to validate my existence, it will mean that I’m shortchanging myself."
"Fine artists deal with finery, but I deal with painful material."
"It is personal issues that makes me do what I do, for I have been raped more than 50 times by just listening to what women who have confessed and confirmed their love for other women have been through."
"But the fact that we have one of the most advanced constitutions has had little impact on mindsets in townships. Members of our community are celebrating the constitution, but it is very different in the society."
"It is being both black and gay which is problematic."
"They should hold workshops on the constitution in all the townships - people are not aware of our rights and needs."
"I don’t get why these kids think they’re the first. There’s a lacking in historical referencing and reverencing. Their art doesn’t take any risks. It doesn’t love itself. It doesn’t love people. It’s only interested in power; not even power, it’s all vanity. And I don’t think people are looking at books enough."
"Artists have got to be the interpreters and intermediaries in spaces. So they consume information, they go into these vile, volatile environments and you take all of it. They reconfigure it and put it through their being and then they create these things that cause a shift vibrationally, spirituality, intellectually and emotionally for the people that engage with it. I am also a glutton for information. I consume information all the time. I read. It infiltrates the work."
"Making work is a documentation of a journey - each stage, each process, each dilemma has to be worked through. At one time I felt pressured to do a lot of things at the same time, but now I want to take one step at a time. When you make an artwork you're not just doing something at that moment, you're contributing to an entire history of artmaking."
"In Podor in Senegal, the place where I grew up, everyone is an artist because art in Africa is not a commercial enterprise but is part of life itself."
"Let me explain. When I was young, I used to watch the fishermen by the banks of the Senegal river. They were working close to the desert in intense heat, and whenever they stopped working they would start to sing."
"In Podor, people sing naturally about their experiences, their lives and their relationships. It is not just musicians and singers who perform. Everybody has a part to play - even children are allowed to join in if they have the inspiration. It doesn't matter if your voice is not the finest; everyone is involved."
"Musicians are respected, but only in the context that the music itself belongs to the community - not to the person who is playing an instrument or singing a song."
"Computers and digital technology are becoming very important to African artists, just as elsewhere. I see it with the impact of hip-hop across the continent. You can see it beginning to have an impact on the visual arts."
"I stopped looking at art for a while, actually. It’s no longer this holistic thing that you’re looking at. It’s a statement. It’s about poverty, it’s about the global crises, post-colonial this, that. Tick box, tick box, tick box. It’s got all these fucking issues and I’m just looking at shit. There’s no kind of material engagement."
"The performance that happens as an artist within that space becomes a political decision to keep the work alive, relevant and moving. If I didn’t I would be ostracised even more."
"I want to know how do I keep expanding what’s possible in the legal range with my body. It’s kind of theatre for adrenaline junkies. Once you start performance art, you keep chasing the dragon."
"People from all over the world, who are the most rigorous thinkers, were making work out of stuff in real time. That’s not necessarily paint on canvas; it’s material and matter that speaks. It blew my mind. I cried for a year. I couldn’t. I had a breakdown because I realised the depth of the deception and how far and controlled it was. Seeing people of colour make art in my lifetime blew me the fuck away."
"The work that I’m making happens, stylistically, because of all the financial restrictions that I have to go through in order to make it. Sometimes I hustle, I ask for favours. Sometimes I’m using a lesser kind of grade of material, but I know it’s like that because of the necessity of having the work made. That adds a richness to the work."
"There are more gentle ways to make art."
"When you start to perform a particular character for the media or historians, you get locked into them. So even when you start writing, there’s no space for your words to be published. Now that I’m an academic, I can say what I like and write what I like. When I write what I like, it’s going to be fucken dangerous."
"Tracey Rose is not a practitioner who jumps at every curatorial opportunity offered her, and has been known to withdraw from more than one exhibition if the circumstances have not seemed right."
"I first met Tracey Rose eleven years ago. I was researching the connections between healing and art in the work of contemporary artists from Africa. There was something in her art that spoke of the shaman, the alchemist, the revealer of wounds, the reorderer of worlds. From the beginning, I loved all the facets of her and of her work: the mischief and joy and delight of the girl; the boundless sensuality and wisdom of the woman; the vastness of spirit, placing her somewhere between this plane and another, channeling perpetually distant truths, some more gentle and others with more violent vibratory force."
"Rose embodies various caricatures of beauty, from porn star Cicciolina to the European Queen, invoking those forms of masking and masquerade that in their grotesque heightening of contour, of color, of symbolism, reveal an essence usually hidden."
"If we are to look at Rose’s career in the form of a linear timeline exhibiting important moments in the artist’ career, we see that her work is a threaded by essential fractiles through a landscape of powerful ideas, she is listening and responding to conditions."
"Without providing any definite answers, I think my work raises questions about attitudes towards race and gender. I think it operates on different levels and reflects different racial and political experiences - but I don't think my pieces are limited by that. I hope they transcend and go beyond that, and provide a space for illusion and fantasy. They reflect a desire to present myself in various ways to counter the image that has been imposed on me. Race is inevitable in South Africa."
"The self is explored as an ongoing process of construction in time and place. The presence and absence of the body in the work points to the idea that one's identity is not static, and constantly in a state of flux."
"I don’t have a ‘feminist artist statement’ as such. Being a woman is only one aspect of who I am."
"Searle pays constant attention to the social issues and movements in South Africa, such as xenophobia, access to housing, land and political protests. Her work is not reducible to simple poignant condemning. Rather, through her visual language, ripe with symbolism and narrativity, she creates the entanglement of poetic and violent imagery which captures the contradictions and complexities of South Africa."
"We were denied the experience of knowing what Nelson Mandela looked like. We were denied the experience of each other's lives." Still, "one developed ways around the system that were illicit but expressive . . . we all learned, as it were, to wiggle and squiggle."
"I had everything I needed, and I went to a good high school which was multiracial. Many families couldn't afford to send their kids there but I was fortunate that my mum was able to. I guess that also pushed me in a certain direction."
"There were no museums and galleries in the town I grew up in; that was foreign to me."
"...I can now marry the two worlds – fashion and fine art aren't far off from each other."
"The fabric used to produce uniforms for domestic workers is an instantly recognizable sight in domestic spaces in South Africa, and by applying it to Victorian dress she attempts to make a comment about history of servitude and colonization as it relates to the present in terms of domestic relationships."
"The female visual artists before my generation worked extra hard and paved the way for me. Some of them are being recognised only now; they died poor. For me it was easy; these women were the stepping stones."
"This was more about how I see the world and how I look at myself as a black woman born in apartheid South Africa in 1982."
"Sibande has used her work to expose many different things, from postcolonial South Africa to stereotypes of women as well as stereotypes regarding black women in South Africa."
"Her work contains multiple types of mediums such as sculpture, photography, design, collage, and even theatrics. Sibande's painting and sculpture uses the human form to explore the construction of identity in a postcolonial South African context, but also attempts to critique stereotypical depictions of women, particularly black women."
"Sibande's theatrical quotations of the language of dress and use of dramatic poses may be related to photographic representations of the Victorian female hysteric in various stages of a hysterical attack, in that they both evoke a sense of excess."
"Her body of work is divided into colour-based themes, and after her ‘blue period’, Mary moved to purple, with the highly acclaimed The Purple Shall Govern.""
"I am trying to reconstruct a vision of District Six as it was in the 1960s,"
"As far as was possible, I worked from old archival photos of the district, first engraving, then inking up the areas with etching ink, and finally cleaning the ink from the surface, so that only the ink in the lines remained. I used a tin of ink I discovered in my studio, dating from the 80s and made by the incomparable T E Lawrence of London."
"Standing at the window through many different weathers, trying to reconstruct that vanished landscape, many visitors to the gallery came up to me to chat, and recall their memories of District Six, or asked me what exactly I was doing."
"I enjoyed these encounters. As an artist, one so seldom knows what the reaction of visitors to a gallery really is, or if they understand what one is trying to do."
"Trained as a printmaker, Williamson also works in video, photography and installation. Her work addresses the media, social issues and aspects of contemporary history."
"Williamson also writes and lectures about art, and is the author of the classic ‘Resistance Art in South Africa’ (1989). In 2009, she published ‘South African Art Now’ (HarperCollins, New York)."
"Throughout her career artist Sue Williamson has asked viewers of her photos, videos, urban graffiti and other pigeonhole-resistant labours to critically think about how and where they live."
"Williamson is a social commentator and combines slick aesthetic devices with hard, cutting edge facts of life. This is almost contradictory, yet it is precisely in this tension, that we are both lured into the artwork and then come away thinking about the issues, the image thus returns to text as it were."
"Williamson ran a series of workshops where she explored the power of place and its identity to various citizens. At the end of the workshop, a consensus was reached on how best to exemplify their feelings around that particular place."
"I’m not doing acting for fame or to be a celebrity. I do it because it’s a calling. I believe I was chosen to tell these stories and bring hope to people"
"I was excited, and he was just as excited to work with me. It was confusing to me that someone like him would be impressed working with me"
"Believe in yourself, Don’t lose your identity trying to fit in"