Jabulani Dhlamini

Goodman Gallery Johannesburg
17 April – 11 May 2019

For his fourth exhibition with Goodman Gallery, Jabulani Dhlamini presents a recent series of photographs taken across the country and continent. Integrating ethnographic and autobiographic approaches to image making, Dhlamini unpacks our subjective relationship to space. Marking a departure for Dhlamini, this work sits between figuration and abstraction which results in images that are both decisive and critical, resisting easy interpretation or categorisation.

In late 2016 Dhlamini travelled to his birthplace in the province of Free State to visit his great grandfather’s grave. The site was on a farm which had been home to several generations of Dhlamini’s family, who ‘earned the right’ to live there during apartheid as long as a male member of the family worked the land. The family later lost their access to the land when Dhlamini’s uncle, who had lived on the plot for over 50 years, passed away leaving no one to take over his ‘duty’.

By re-visiting this place Dhlamini hoped to access memories he had otherwise been denied. Dhlamini returned to Warden several times over the next year in order to capture images of the land his family had once occupied as well as the community who still called the town their home.

In another work in this series, Dhlamini uses a medium-format camera to document a common type of semi-detached house found in Soweto. Built as a means to accommodate the influx of new residents forced into Soweto during apartheid due to the Group Areas Act, the houses were typically split down the middle and shared between two families. These images appear in the form of a photographic grid depicting an architectural typology. Shown in this manner the work illustrates the disjuncture between the uniformity of the houses and individual characteristics formed through years of occupation. For Dhlamini, these images represent the intersection between personal and social memory, functioning in a similar manner to how Mandela’s house in Soweto was turned into a museum.

“These ordinary people’s homes are a testament to that same history and can be seen as archives of their lived experience,” says Dhlamini. “I grew up in one of these houses myself after my family moved from Warden to Soweto.”

In mid-2017, Dhlamini visited Reunion Islands as part of a residency. On the trip, Dhlamini encountered a number of headless statues. Interested to learn more about the history of these defaced monuments, Dhlamini sought more information but soon found that most preferred to give him the tourist- friendly version of events, an experience reflected in his photographs from the visit. Later that year, Dhlamini visited the now empty plinth of Cecil John Rhodes’ statue at the University of Cape Town. While there he encountered tourists standing beside locals, all taking photos of the absent monument.

“What happens when tensions are hidden in plain sight,” asks Dhlamini. This question serves as a driving force behind this work, which serves as a prompt for a broader conversation around what we do with the history that informs our identity, even if it feels alien to us.

The approximate English translation for the Xhosa word ‘ixesha’ is time. By titling his third solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery iXesha!, Jabulani Dhlamini offers a lens for considering this elusive concept through his photography, which expands on the notion of time in various ways.

This early-career survey brings together recent bodies of work in which Dhlamini explores the concept of a collective national memory in light of South Africa’s traumatic history.

iQhawekazi (2018), a key series on this exhibition, responds to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s recent death. For this series, Dhlamini turns his camera toward symbolic expressions of mourning and memory, such as the informal street memorials that coalesced around Madikizela-Mandela’s official memorial in Soweto. This moving series was first published in the Financial Times for the ‘Millennials’ edition in April 2018. Among the nine photographers selected for this issue, Dhlamini was the only featured artist from the African continent. In this special edition, he is named as ‘one of the best young photographic talents around the world’.

Another key series in iXesha! is Recaptured (2016), in which Dhlamini explores the interaction between personal and collective memory within the context of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. From 2013 to 2016, Dhlamini spent time with South Africans who experienced the trauma of the massacre, seeking to create a visual representation of social memory by photographing objects which triggered individual recollections of that historic day.

Dhlamini’s characteristically subtle approach to capturing South Africa’s fraught past and present positions him within a specific trajectory of South African photography, initially carved out by the late David Goldblatt. In recognition of a shared sensibility, Dhlamini was selected by Goldblatt to feature alongside three other young local photographers for Five Photographers, A Tribute to David Goldblatt at the French Institute in Johannesburg earlier this year.

For Dhlamini, iXesha! represents an important moment, ‘bringing together various bodies of work that document the present in different contexts, as I lay down a foundation for navigating the future’.

According to curator Teboho Ralesai, Dhlamini’s subtlety in vision stems from the fact that he sees the self as equally important to the collective: ‘This translates into shooting quiet moments and symbolic objects, often pointing away from the action, which can, in turn, resonate very powerfully with a sense of collective feeling and memory.’

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Jabulani Dhlamini was born in Warden, Free State in 1983. In 2012, Dhlamini held his first solo exhibition at the Market Photo Workshop Gallery in Johannesburg and the following year, his first commercial exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape Town. Prior to that, Dhlamini received a National Diploma in Photography from the Vaal University of Technology in 2009. He is the recipient of numerous awards in photography, including two Profoto Awards in 2008 and in 2009, a Fujifilm Southern Africa Photographic Award and Edward Ruiz Mentorship for 2011—2012. He lives and works in Johannesburg.

ABOUT THE CURATOR:

iXesha! is the first exhibition curated by Teboho Ralesai at Goodman Gallery.

Ralesai has a B.Tech fine Art from Vaal University of technology. In 2013 he participated in the Marco Cianfanelli mentorship programme as part of the Standard Bank New Rosebank Headquarters Sculpture Installation. He previously curated a group show at SoMa Art Space in Johannesburg, and exhibited his own artwork at the FNB Art Fair in 2014 and 2015.

Goodman Gallery Johannesburg Viewing Room
2 June – 14 July 2018

‘I wanted to collect the ambience of the event within me, then to pick up my camera while continuing to listen to the atmosphere – post-funeral, but not post-mourning’ – Jabulani Dhlamini

On 14 April 2018 Jabulani Dhlamini attended Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s funeral at the Orlando Stadium in Soweto. He absorbed the charged atmosphere but left his camera untouched in his bag. When the crowds dispersed, the Johannesburg rain was heavy – a sign, Dhlamini thought, of the prevailing spiritual presence of ‘Mama Winnie’, invoking the phrase ‘upahla luwile’ (when you lose a mother the roof of the home has fallen in).

In this photographic series, titled iQhawekazi, Dhlamini journeys from the official site of the funeral to informal memorial gatherings in Soweto. While pointing his camera at symbolic expressions of mourning and memory, Dhlamini observed that ‘in the township, where stories are told on the walls. Winnie is missing’. He critiques this void in Taba Dimahlong in which Steve Biko’s face appears behind a rainy window, graffitied onto a shop exterior – out of focus and at the margins of the image – in an effort to shift the eye to the blank space on the wall ‘where the Mother of the nation belongs’ (Dhlamini).

This moving series recently featured in the Financial Times ‘Millennials’ edition, naming Dhlamini ‘one of the best young photographic talents around the world’. He was one of nine photographers featured in the edition and the only photographer from the African continent.

This exhibition marks the first display of the iQhawekazi series. Work by Dhlamini recently featured on the Five Photographers, A Tribute to David Goldblatt group exhibition at the Gerard Sekoto Gallery at the French Institute. Dhlamini studied at the Vaal University of Technology. He majored in documentary photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg and he was the recipient of the Edward Ruiz Mentorship 2011/12. His work focuses on his upbringing, as well as the way he views contemporary South Africa.

Goodman Gallery Cape Town
10 March – 6 April 2016

In Recapture, Jabulani Dhlamini utilises the medium of photography to explore and question how South Africa’s traumatic and violent past permeates the consciousness of its people. The series, the first since the artist’s breakout exhibition uMama in 2012, documents the town of Sharpeville, ruminating on the process of recovery and memorial in post-apartheid South Africa. Born in 1983, the artist considers himself to be bound not only by his past but by a history of violence. The artist recalls the moments leading up to South Africa’s first democratic elections – “I knew that something important was happening, makeshift posters and pictures of Mandela were posted all over the streets, but at the time I didn’t realise that the man in the pictures was the soon-to-be leader of a new South Africa – I didn’t realise the implications of what this was.”

Growing up during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, Biko, Hani and Subokwe were names the artist heard constantly. Not realising the context of these overheard conversations, the young Dhlamini believed these to be distant relatives. Although he later realised the true nature of what he had heard, the idea that the leaders of the struggle were part of a close family bond rather than celebrated heroes and part of the collective consciousness of his community never really left him. Speaking about these early memories Dhlamini states “I think a lot of us feel this way, even with what we know now, we can’t help feeling that the history is much closer to us. I think that’s why children often appear in my work – I am interested in what past they will inherit.”

The decision to photograph the town and its people came from the artist’s need to engage physically with a place that looms so large in the country’s past. “I needed to visit the actual location, to place myself in that landscape. I needed to see, and not imagine, the wall they hid behind, the street where the first shots were fired.” It is these locations, produced as tableaux, that form the first part of the exhibition.

In the three years it took to produce the Sharpeville series, Dhlamini conducted interviews with members of the community. It was during these interviews that he realised how victims constructed informal memorials to the massacre. Tea cups held at the time the first shot was heard, boots which were worn at the massacre, and clothing belonging to the deceased are kept in the houses of victims as personal objects of remembrance. Again we encounter the role of individual processes of mourning and understanding which so fascinates the artist.

In Objects, photographs of personal items which signify the massacre to their owners are placed in a grid next to texts which outline their context. Deliberately blurring the narrative, the writing slips between the subject and interlocutor so that rather than provide a concrete context the texts serve to heighten the ambiguity of history.

For Dhlamini the feeling of uncertainty which the works evoke creates a juxtaposition between lived experience and inherited memory.

Goodman Gallery Cape Town is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Jabulani Dhlamini. In 2011 Dhlamini was awarded the annual Edward Ruiz mentorship, which helps promising young photographers develop a substantial body of work under the mentorship of a professional photographer. Under the guidance of Jodi Bieber, Dhlamini’s project culminated in the exhibition of uMama at the Market Photo Workshop Gallery, now seen in Cape Town for the first time.

In uMama, Dhlamini pays tribute to mothers, and explores the particular challenges faced by women raising children on their own in South African townships. In intimate portraits of these single mothers and their homes, Dhlamini raises a range of questions about the roles women are expected to play, and how the act mothering is framed and perceived in contemporary South African society. And in portraits of young men raised by single mothers, the artist self-reflexively considers what it means to become a man in a house without a father.

Jabulani Dhlamini was born in Warden, Free State in 1983. He received a National Diploma in Photography from the Vaal University of Technology in 2009. He is the recipient of numerous awards in photography, including 2 Profoto Awards in 2008 and 2009, a Fujifilm Southern Africa Photographic Award in 2009 and the Edward Ruiz Mentorship for 2011-2012. He held his first solo exhibition in 2012 at the Market Photo Workshop Gallery. He lives and works in Johannesburg.

Goodman Gallery Johannesburg
4 June – 6 August 2016

In 2016, Goodman Gallery celebrates its 50th anniversary – five decades of forging change through artistic production and dialogue, shaping contemporary art within and beyond the continent. From early June, we will host major exhibitions between our Johannesburg and Cape Town galleries featuring significant work, installations, interventions, performances, a video and talks programmes.

Titled New Revolutions, our programme will include prominent international and African artists – each part of the Goodman Gallery’s history, present and future – engaging with the idea of perpetual change, alternative independent movements and the reinvigorating of ideology based upon mutable historical realities. The project as a whole will consider Goodman Gallery’s history as an inclusive space, as well as its approach to showing contemporary art that shifts perspectives and engenders social transformation.

New Revolutions recalls the fulcrum of activity into which the gallery was borne 50 years ago: revolutionary fervour, the gradual decolonisation of African countries and radical responses to the status quo. Locally, the gallery maintained a responsibility to show work by South African artists as museums served the agenda of the discriminatory government. By transcending its role as a commercial space Goodman Gallery rose to prominence as a progressive institution. And, while South Africa was deep in the throes of a draconian era, figures within the fight for African independence trail-blazed the struggle against apartheid. This exhibition reflects on how the events in Africa then, still play a part in the conceptual thinking of artists now. And, beyond that, how artists have responded to new forms of economic colonisation, migrancy, as well as radicalised reactions to economic inequality and lingering institutional racism.

By considering how the roles of artists cross into the realm of activism and socially transformative endeavours, New Revolutions explores historical and contemporary tensions and movements that are unfolding in Africa and around the world, through the panorama of contemporary art.

The 2016 anniversary programme highlights Goodman Gallery’s ongoing affiliation with artists who explore the power of dissent and the importance of alternative factions and cross-disciplinary collaborations in order to engender change and encourage dialogue. A non-chronological, intergenerational but conceptually linked collection of artworks from the 1960s to the present will focus on the spirit of protest, resistance, and revolution, and the way in which South Africa, and Goodman Gallery in particular, has offered an important platform from which to explore such approaches.

The Artists

On the occasion of its 50th anniversary Goodman Gallery takes pleasure in announcing new partnerships with some of the world’s most significant artists – Sonia Gomes (Brazil), Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola), Shirin Neshat (Iran) – revealing new directions in the gallery’s programme. Locally, we announce the representation by Goodman Gallery of Tabita Rezaire and The Brother Moves On. In addition, the exhibition will include work by international artists Kapwani Kiwanga (US) and Jacolby Satterwhite (US).

New Revolutions will provide an opportunity to exhibit those who have worked with the gallery for decades including William Kentridge, David Koloane, Sam Nhlengethwa, David Goldblatt and Tracey Rose, and some of the most influential younger voices in contemporary art including Kudzanai Chiurai, Hasan and Husain Essop, Mikhael Subotzky, Gerald Machona and Haroon Gunn-Salie. The show will also include artists who have been integral in the gallery’s transformation over the past decade, including Ghada Amer, Candice Breitz, Alfredo Jaar, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, and Hank Willis Thomas. Performances will be presented by local innovators, Nelisiwe Xaba and The Brother Moves On.
Beyond this, the iconic significance of the gallery, and the historical moment necessitates that certain artists whose ideas and actions impacted on society, and on the course of art history, be included. Artists like Walter Wahl Battis, Cecil Skotnes, Ezrom Legae, Leonard Matsotso and Sydney Khumalo are exhibited as part of our endeavour to show how the regeneration of ideas – and the gallery as a repository of change – is not confined to epochs.

With New Revolutions we invite you to celebrate with Goodman Gallery as we pay homage to artists who have shaped the landscape of contemporary art in Southern Africa. These include artists based on the continent, those of the Diaspora, our northern counterparts who have been distanced from sub-Saharan Africa and those from outside of Africa whose work explores territory such as unequal power structures and socio-political constructs.

New Revolutions is curated by Liza Essers and will take place throughout the month of June at our Johannesburg and Cape Town galleries, and with a special selection of works for Art Basel from 16 June to 19 June.