Exhibition Type: Group Exhibition
Artist(s): Thembinkosi Hlathswayo, Khanya Zibaya, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Thero Makepe and Santu Mofokeng. (Photo credit: Lindokuhle Sobekwa. Where the Accident Happened (2023)
Venue: Vela Projects
Address: 66 Plein Street, Cape Town
Opening: 27 August 6pm
Exhibition End Date: 26 September 2026
Description:
Taking as it’s starting point the evolving legacy of photography in Southern Africa, Metaphorical
Biographies, places a new generation of photographers alongside a small section of works by Santu
Mofokeng, one of the seminal figures in the history of South African art. Drawing from Mofokeng’s
concept of the metaphoric biography, the exhibition includes practices which have a close emphasis
of biography, personal experience and history – especially within the context of a post-democratic
South Africa.
On the eve of Santu Mofokeng’s major international retrospective in Paris, thirty years after he
had begun taking photographs, he reflected in an interview,
“When I first became a professional photographer, I started working on a project called Fictional
Biography, a sort of metaphorical biography of my life, going to places I would ordinarily go,
making photographs of things I ordinarily do and see.” (Diserens, 2011) 1
It’s a modest description for a body of work that would go on to include some of the most quietly
rigorous photographic essays to come out of South Africa. Over the course of his career,
Mofokeng used this same lens — his own “idiosyncratic peregrinations,” as he called them — to
drift outward from his autobiography into a broader observation of his community and country.
In part his work made reference to what he referred to as a “spiritual insecurity” — a condition he
identified as persisting in South Africa in the years following the end of apartheid. He returned to a
Chinese belief he had encountered, that the body carries the memory of one’s ancestors, and
used it to explain why remembering mattered so urgently:
“Whenever we come under threat, we remember who we are and where we come from, and we respond accordingly.” (Diserens, 2011)
For Mofokeng, remembering — or, as he sometimes wrote it, re/membering — was never simply
recalling fact. It was a practice of restoring what had been forgotten to the body and to the
landscape, erased, or distorted, sometimes by chance and sometimes deliberately. His invocation
of the body as a repository of ancestral memory suggests something broader. Memory becomes a
practice of reconnecting oneself to histories that remain active in the present. South Africa raises
many questions about memory: how it is preserved, what has been withheld from memory, and
what it costs a person or a society to recover it. These questions remain very much open in the
contemporary landscape, even as the tools and conditions for asking them have changed
considerably.
Today, photographers have inherited an incomplete archive. The present moment contains the
unfinished business of the past: gaps in the family archive, absences in the historical record,
questions of identity and belonging that have been obscured. Furthermore, their practice utilises a medium that has become common practice within a digitised world grappling with globalisation.
They are tasked with sifting through archives that have become significantly oversaturated — but
no less incomplete.
Working with this inheritance means treating the archive itself — family albums, oral testimony,
official records, the body — as a site of active work, not a finished document to be simply
reproduced. When it comes to the personal, and the subjective, biography is less a subject than a
method. Personal histories have become points of access to larger inherited structures: family
histories entangled with migration, labour, dispossession, urbanisation and the unfinished social
realities of post-apartheid South Africa. And, photographers are embracing subjectivity,
reconstruction, performance and personal narrative not as departures from history, but as ways of
engaging it in the present.
In order to drive this conversation around memory and inheritance, this exhibition includes works
by contemporary artists whose work engages the biographical construction of Santu Mofokeng,
but feels distinctly affected by the concerns of photography as a medium today: Lindokuhle
Sobekwa, Thero Makepe, Tshepiso Mazibuko, Khanya Zibaya, and Thembinknosi Hlatshwayo.
What emerges across these practices is not a rejection of photography’s documentary
inheritance, but a reconfiguration of it. If earlier generations often positioned the photographer as
witness, these artists increasingly position the photographer as participant — implicated in,
shaped by and responsible for the histories they seek to understand.
Ultimately, this exhibition is an invitation to “that which expects subjectivity, allows for the fallibility
of memory, and seeks not to find out exactly what happened so much as to understand how those
events left their mark.” 2
1 Diserens, C., 2011. Chasing Shadows: Santu Mofokeng – Thirty Years of Photographic Essays.
In: Chasing Shadows. Munich: Prestel, pp. 9-16.
2 Tell Me What You Remember: Sue Williamson and Lebohang Kganye, Ed. Emma Lewis, 2023. Yale
University Press, Philadelphia.
