Structures of Dominion and Democracy
By David Goldblatt
Image: David Goldblatt, Sculpted by Kagiso Pat Mautloa, a memorial to those who died while in the detention of the Security Police in this building formerly known as John Vorster Square, now Johannesburg Central Police Station. 27 February 2012, Silver gelatin print on fibre based paper, 98 x 120cm
Until 7 August
Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery, Sasol Library, UFS
Monday to Friday: 08:30 – 16:30
This exhibition is dedicated to the series “Structures”, one of the major bodies of works by renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt. For over three decades Goldblatt has travelled South Africa photographing sites and structures weighted with historical narrative: monuments, private, religious and secular, that reveal something about the people who built them. These sites allow us a glimpse into the everyday. Each place is a repository, a landscape containing an epic story that has involved whole communities: the experience sometimes told through the memorialising of remarkable individuals.
The exhibition Structures of Dominion and Democracy traverses two distinct eras in South Africa history. As Goldblatt explains "over the years I have photographed South African structures which I found eloquent of the dominion which Whites gradually came to exert over all of South Africa and its peoples. That time of domination began in 1660 when Jan van Riebeeck ordered a cordon to be erected of blockhouses and barriers that would exclude the indigenous population from access to the first European settlement in South Africa and its herds, lands, water and grazing. The time of domination ended on the 2nd of February 1990, when, on behalf of the government and the Whites of South Africa, President FW de Klerk effectively abdicated from power. Beginning in 1999 and continuing to the present, I have photographed some structures that are eloquent of our still nascent democracy. In the belief that in what we build we express much about what we value, I have looked at South African structures as declarations of our value systems, our ethos."