Two South African Artists Reflect on the Memories of Apartheid

On May 10, 1994, South Africans inaugurated Nelson Mandela as their first Black president, bringing to an end the country’s notorious system of apartheid. Nearly thirty years later, crucial questions remain about ensuring equal rights for all South Africans. How might these citizens account for the trauma of violent racial segregation? How can they reconcile personal memories with official state accounts? And what role can artists play in creating new avenues for those personal and national narratives?

The exhibition Tell Me What You Remember, curated by Emma Lewis and currently on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, thoughtfully addresses these questions as they surface in the work of South African artists Sue Williamson, who was born in 1941 and grew up under apartheid, and Lebohang Kganye, who was born in 1990, the year that then president F. W. de Klerk unbanned the African National Congress, setting in motion apartheid’s dismantling. Importantly, the landmark 1994 general elections created a generational divide between those who directly experienced the horrors of apartheid and those who have grown up in its aftermath (often referred to as “born frees”). Bringing together an artist from each side of this divide, the exhibition highlights how each thinks about memory in relation to both trauma and healing, as well as the subtle differences in their approaches.

Entering the gallery, visitors are greeted by images of women who lived through apartheid. Williamson’s contributions include multiracial portraits from her series All Our Mothers (1983–ongoing), which documents—with real emotional force—everyday people who fought against that system. The entryway to the exhibition also includes Kganye’s larger-than-life portraits of matrilineal ancestors from her series Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (2022), which the artist has beautifully rendered in carefully quilted swatches of fabric. This first moment of Tell Me What You Remember is the only one where Kganye’s and Williamson’s work is directly in dialogue; the rest of the exhibition is divided evenly between the two artists.

In her multifaceted practice, Williamson explores the ways that apartheid laws affected individual lives and communities, and her side of the exhibition is organized into areas loosely categorized as “Testimony” and “Memory Work.” Her works in the latter section center on the effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and demonstrate the exhibition’s focus on the complexity of living memory. In the video installation That Particular Morning (2019), Doreen Mgoduka and her son Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka discuss the loss of Glen Mgoduka, a police officer whom apartheid police murdered in 1989 to cover up the role of white police colleagues in activist assassinations. More than a retelling of that trauma, the video stages a long overdue, and at times strained, conversation in which the two talk about how the death of Doreen’s husband and Siyah’s father has affected their relationship. Throughout much of the dialogue, Doreen sits back in her chair with her hands clasped or arms crossed as Siyah gestures broadly and occasionally wipes away tears. Each is captured by a different camera, although the two videos are projected onto one screen. This approach illustrates their different access to memory, and the difficulty of bringing the two perspectives into a seamless narrative.

Recreating images from family albums, Kganye returned to the sites of the photographs, often putting on the same outfit that her mother had worn and assuming her mother’s pose.

Reflecting an important theme of the exhibition, That Particular Morning seems to ask, what does all of this sharing of memory add up to? This question links many of Williamson’s works. For instance, in the series Truth Games (1998), she directs this question at the TRC hearings, in which victims of apartheid violence were brought together with perpetrators who confessed their crimes in the name of national “healing.” In each of these works, a press photograph from a well-publicized case is sandwiched between a photograph of an accuser on one side and a defendant on the other. Movable Perspex slats partially block the images, demonstrating how words can obscure the truth, or perhaps that full transparency remains forever out of reach. Similarly, Memorial to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (2016) resembles a tombstone upon which the alternating and repeating phrases “can’t remember” and “can’t forget” are printed onto glass. The difference between the inability to forget and the desire to not remember marks the power differential in the TRC process as well as the problems inherent in transforming personal memories into collective histories.

In contrast, Kganye’s practice largely addresses apartheid indirectly, leading with explorations of her family’s archive. In the exhibition, works grouped together under the label “In Search for Memory” suggest the urgency and poignancy of such searching. For example, the sudden death of the artist’s mother in 2010 inspired a series called Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story (2013). Recreating images from family albums, Kganye returned to the sites of the photographs, often putting on the same outfit that her mother had worn and assuming her mother’s pose. What began as separate images of reenactment transformed into photomontages of the two women, with the figure of Lebohang creating a ghostly double of the elder Kganye. The longing in these montages is especially apparent in Setshwantso le ngwanaka II (2013), where Kganye, wearing a red dress and a tender smile, mirrors her mother’s gesture of beckoning to a toddler who is the artist herself. These images bring to mind performance scholar Joseph Roach’s notion of surrogation, a process through which individuals—or collectives—perform the past to enact a sense of continuity. But as Roach points out, the process is always marred by the deficit or surplus created when a new person steps into an established role.

Rather than lament this lack of seamless continuity, Kganye makes works that revel in it, embracing the idea that family albums and, more broadly, family stories, are spaces of fantasy and creative possibility. In a short video titled Pied Piper’s Voyage (2014), she performs stories, gleaned from family members, about her grandfather’s journey from farmland in the Orange Free State to Johannesburg in search of work. As in the series Her-story, Kganye dons her grandfather’s clothes, but in this work, the doubling is even more theatrical: The artist moves among cardboard set pieces that are scaled-up photographs from the family archive. Posing alongside the black-and-white, two-dimensional set pieces, she enacts both the disjunct between the present and the past as well as the mutability of memory, demonstrating how an artist can rearrange elements of the past at will.

If Kganye’s work illustrates the power that artists have in restaging the past, the series In Search for Memory (2020) extends this idea into a speculative future. The works, photographs of miniature dioramas, are based on Ta O’Reva (2015), a science fiction novella by the Malawian writer Muthi Nhlema. In Nhlema’s apocalyptic setting, South Africa has collapsed in a sequence of events that began with a race riot and resulted in the spread of a deadly contagion. Kganye’s works picture some of the novella’s most powerful moments, as in the image He could hear the voices of his ancestors (2020), in which a little boy hides under a kitchen table as his father is being murdered by a white farmer, or The stranger stood before what to him was a monstrosity (2020), in which a reanimated Nelson Mandela surveys the nation’s ruin, an outcome that occurs in spite of a lifetime of sacrifice. If the images gesture to Afrofuturism, they are also resolutely dystopic.

In her essay on Williamson in the exhibition’s catalog, the writer Nkgopoleng Moloi describes the artist’s work as “the unfinished project of emancipation.” Tell Me What You Remember proposes that both Williamson and Kganye participate in this project, whether mining collective or personal archives or picturing possible futures. In either case, the artists powerfully engage memory as a material, pointing to its potential for transformation.

Sue Williamson & Lebohang Kganye: Tell Me What You Remember is on view at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, through May 21, 2023.