At the Barnes Foundation, “Sue Williamson & Lebohang Kganye: Tell Me What You Remember” was a two-woman show organized by Emma Lewis, a curator at Turner Contemporary in Margate, England. The exhibition featured photographs, videos, and mixed-media installations that revisit the artists’ memories of growing up in South Africa, where they both continue to live and work (Williamson in Cape Town, Kganye in Johannesburg). In the postapartheid era, memory remains a contentious and political zone, one that continues to divide South Africans between those who seek to fortify the dominant narrative of a liberated polity and those who challenge the veracity of this claim.
Since the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement—a student-led revolt aimed at taking down a statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, which led to a push in decolonizing the sociopolitical and educational systems across all of South Africa—the dubious claim that democracy delivered “freedom for all” has become even more specious. “Tell Me What You Remember” partly presupposed, and even undermined, this bifurcation in memory through its title. But how do we recall and remain attentive to a past that refuses to stay there?
The show staged a transgenerational and racial dialogue between the artists—one white, one Black—whose work invokes the past in two different ways. Williamson, born in 1941, is a renowned white anti-apartheid activist and writer whose art follows a more conventional approach to political commentary via memory, reconciliation, and the transmission of information. Kganye, born in 1990, also traverses this territory of memory, but through a different route: She draws from her family’s history and archives via an inward-looking tack that is distinct from the “struggle aesthetic” typified by Williamson’s art.
Set against a selection of older works, some of which dated back to the 1980s, Williamson’s pair of two-channel video installations, What is this thing called freedom?, 2016, and That particular morning, 2019, staged dialogues between mothers and their children. In both works, the younger generations are often at odds with their elders, questioning their motives to “forgive and forget” historical injustices or their instinctive desires for restitution. In each piece, the interlocutors are pictured on two separate screens—generationally divided—and talk about myriad issues, including single-parenting, apartheid killings, retribution, reconciliation, and how apartheid dramatically impacted family relations and heightened socioeconomic inequalities in its aftermath. Kganye chose a different interaction with her elders—a more celebratory and commemorative one—as shown in her photo series “Ke Lefa Laka: Her-story” (It’s My Heritage: Her-Story), 2013. In these images, Kganye reproduced old pictures of her late mother and restaged them by acting as her ghostly double. In a conversation with Williamson, Kganye noted that in this “journey of recording my family history . . . [I] try to locate myself in the family narrative or in the family history,” thereby turning the work into a sort of reconfiguration of the past. The prints were all displayed in a kind of oval shape, resembling a human eye, a symbolic motif that represents the interrelation between witness and photographic act.
The show conformed somewhat to the narrative trope of aesthetic difference in the ways in which Williamson and Kganye were positioned on the political-versus-quotidian axis. The exhibition also played into the dominant liberal view of multiracialism that put the postapartheid era on the global map. The dialogic motif became the modus vivendi between the artists and their works. However, what seemed ominous here was the belief that this multiracial/generational dialogue is unfolding between those who were in the struggle and those who were supposedly “born free” (born toward and after the fall of apartheid). But this idea is troubling in many ways, especially considering that the term “born free”—often imposed on Black children—is an analogical catchphrase based on conservationists’ attempts to anthropomorphize African wildlife. I am equally apprehensive about the implied instantiation of a certain South African sisterhood beyond the color line. “Tell Me What You Remember” affirmed the very racially charged subtext that it intended to undermine.
