For more than five centuries the fortunes of the Niger Delta have been closely tied to that of the global economy. For its slave ports, then palm oil industry, and most recently, through the discovery of crude oil in the 1950s. Oil multinationals soon came to the fore, working in alliance with a local elite to strip the region of its wealth and despoil it. At the receiving end are the region’s impoverished inhabitants: left with a poisoned environment, faced with a government that never cares and victims of rival armed militant groups laying claim to territories.
Vasco Araújo works in a variety of media, including video, installation and photography, to explore ideas of community and marginality. Gestures of seduction, cultural stereotypes, political characteristics as well as sexual identities have all been the focus of his work. It has been described as Baroque in its literary, historical and art historical references and he draws the viewer into looking at society, providing both honest as well as artificial reflections.
Makhubu has established herself as one of the new generation of lens based artists to explore issues of identity, culture, land, rights, economy and religion. Her acclaimed series, Self-Portrait Project alludes to the continued alienation and estrangement in an era where the focus is inclined toward self and individual identity as opposed to collective and communal life. One of the canonical meanings that Achille Mbembe (2002: 241) argues can be attributed to slavery and colonialism (as well as Apartheid) is dispossession, a process in which juridical and economic procedures have led to material expropriation. Makhubu’s latest series The Flood has received deserved critical acclaim. It marks a departure from her previous work, shifting from the personal to the public.
These are images that urban black working- and middle-class families had commissioned, requested, or tacitly sanctioned. They are left behind by dead relatives, where they sometimes hang on obscure parlor walls in the townships. In some families they are coveted as treasures, displacing totems in discursive narratives about identity, lineage, and personality. Continue reading Santu Mofokeng→
Terrain is a book of portrait and landscape photographs descriptive of the materiality of labour on a variety of Southern and East African farms. The latest instalment in Nickerson’s long-term enquiry into farm labour, Terrain is neither an impartial nor all-encompassing document of working life in sub-Saharan Africa’s largest employment sector, even if the photographs are underpinned by Nickerson’s acute awareness of these environments as politicised spaces.
Contemporary Photography Index 