Interview with Spoek Mathambo from one small seed on Vimeo.
 

Watch the trailer for the documentary “Future Sound of Mzansi” – Apartheid’s Electro Afterparty
 

Listen to the sound of FANTASMA

Spoek at CT World Music Festival, image: Loyiso Mzamane

Spoek, Eagle Awards, image: Loucas Polydorou

Spoek at CT World Music Festival, image: Loyiso Mzamane

Photograph: Pieter Hugo, Green Point Common, Cape Town, 2013

Over the past eight years Hugo has turned his eye on cramped townships, contested farmlands and abandoned mining areas; psychologically charged still lifes in people’s homes; sites of political significance; drifters and the homeless; his pregnant wife, and his daughter moments after her birth; the domestic servants who have worked for the Hugo family over three generations. The series alternates between intimate and public spaces, with particular emphasis on the growing disparity between rich and poor, and reveals Hugo’s deeply conflicted feelings about his home. It confronts complex issues of colonisation, racial diversity and economic disparity. Kin endeavours to locate his young family in a country with a fraught history and an uncertain future.

Hugo describes the Kin project as:

An engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being ‘colonial driftwood’ … South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and problematic place. It is a very violent society and the scars of colonialism and apartheid still run very deep. Issues of race and cultural custodianship permeate every aspect of society, and the legacy of forced racial segregation casts a long shadow…. How does one live in this society? How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent should one try? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? Before getting married and having children, these questions did not trouble me; now, they are more confusing. This work attempts to address these questions and to reflect on the nature of conflicting personal and collective narratives. I have deeply mixed feelings about being here. I am interested in the places where these narratives collide. Kin is an attempt at evaluating the gap between society’s ideals and its realities.

Photograph: Pieter Hugo, The children’s ward in an abandoned tuberculosis hospital, Mthatha, 2008

Photograph: Pieter Hugo, Theresa Makwenya, Carletonville, 2013

Photograph: Pieter Hugo, Outside Michael’s flat, Troyeville, 2011

Exhibitions:

Hugo was born in 1976 in Johannesburg and grew up in Cape Town, where he lives. His survey exhibition, This Must Be the Place, has showed at the Fotomuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Stimultania Photographic Centre, Strasbourg, France (2012); Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2013); and continues to tour. Some recent group exhibitions include Present Tense, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal (2013); Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, The Walther Collection, Ulm, Germany (2013); Africa: Photographs and video from the Martin Margulies Collection, Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, Edison State College, Florida, USA (2012); Africa, There and Back, Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany (2012); Qui Vive? 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Russia (2012); FotoTriennale.dk, Funen, Denmark (2012); Contact Photography Festival, Toronto, Canada (2011); ARS 11, Kiasma, Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art, Finland (2011); Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, V&A Museum, London, UK (2011); The Eye is a Lonely Hunter: Images of Humankind, Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg, Germany (2011); and The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany (2011).

Awards:

Hugo won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2007; the KLM Paul Huf Award and the Arles Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival in 2008; the Seydou Keita Award at the 9th Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial, Mali, in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse photography prize in 2012.

KIN Info.:

KIN opened in Johannesburg on Thursday 3 October, 6 to 8pm, and runs until 8 November. It opens in Cape Town on Thursday 17 October, 6 to 8pm, and runs until 23 November.

Photograph: Pieter Hugo, Nokhanyo and Ayabukwa Mabuse, Langa, 2013

Photograph: Pieter Hugo, Louis Matanisa, Cape Town, 2013

Photograph: Pieter Hugo, Linda Ntsukwana, Colesberg, 2013

Photograph: Pieter Hugo, At Rietpoort farm, Graaff-Reinet, 2013

Photograph: Pieter Hugo, Aerial view of Diepsloot, 2013

Source: STEVENSON, all photos by Pieter Hugo

I mean, do you honestly think a portrait can tell you anything about the subject? And, even if it did, would you trust what it had to say?

Azuka Adindu (2008)

The Cape Town-based artist’s keen awareness of his vocation’s complexities is reflected in the quality of his work that has the mark of a perfectionist and an aesthetic so deeply sublime that can only have happened at the hand of the finest of artists. Hugo has produced numerous captivating monographs documenting the cultural nuances of Africa, with subjects including the Rwandan genocide, people with AIDS and Tuberculosis, and a range of characters symptomatic of their cultural domain, from Afrikaans farm boys and people with albinism, football supporters and taxi washers, to the enigmatic West African ‘Hyena Men’. His most recent series, Nollywood, explores Africa’s largest film industry and the third largest in the world, the cinema of Nigeria.

The real ‘Nollywood’ is booming, churning out around 1500 films a year – more than Hollywood can boast – and at just fifteen years old is already a $500-million industry. Nigerian films have surpassed American films even in popularity all over Africa, dealing with topics that concern ordinary modern Africans and relayed in traditional story-telling modes using the symbolism and mythology of much older beliefs. It is a salient instance of self-representation in Africa, singular in the adept utilisation of mass media to retell the tale of a rich cultural heritage on its own terms, a tale that otherwise has so often been misrepresented in its telling.

Escort Kama (2008)

Hugo’s Nollywood is a collection of portraits staged to capture the essence of Nigerian cinema in all its melodramatic voodoo-horror-flick glory. He and the actors work together to recreate the stereotypical myths that inspire their cinema, producing an incarnation of Nigeria’s cultural core, a project that is effectively as viscerally real as it is visually surreal.

The staged nature of the portraits lends them an element of humour that is a departure from Hugo’s earlier work. Hugo is frequently accused of romanticising and exploiting his subjects for their exotic otherness, and resolving this debate is no simple task. Nollywood however is more of a re-presentation than a representation, portraying the so-called ‘marginalised other’s’ self-representation: The exotic characters we see have been reflexively created by the people in the photographs who have chosen to present themselves in this way, not for the voyeuristic lens of the Western photographer but for their own idiosyncratic and flourishing film industry. Hugo is not ‘mastering the exotic’ through his photography but rather being allowed to enter a space of simulation and play with it.

And if the results seem bizarre, it perhaps says more about the viewer of the photograph than the photographer himself.

Gabazzini Zuo (2008)

The final product is a poignant commentary on the problematics of photography as we see the increased difficulty in distinguishing simulation from the real, fiction from fact, accuracy from truth: these are photographic records of real actors in a contrived setup, imitating their real vocation which is itself an imitation of life. This poignant undercurrent is a common thread binding Hugo’s body of work ultimately isolating him as a forerunner in his field. Ironic then that a photographer so convincing in his mistrust of photography can nonetheless use a camera to create images so moving that they at once reaffirm the overwhelming value of the person behind the lens.

Omo Omeonu (2008)

Ibegbu Natty (2008)

Words: Sarah Jayne Fell
Images: Courtesy of Pieter Hugo

www.pieterhugo.com

Read the rest of issue 14

Click here to view our #FlashBack selection for October.

Click here to view all our #Flashbacks.

Happening on the 20th of July at the wonderful Fugard Theatre, On The Boil is an attempt to showcase emerging talent. By all accounts the talent involved with these films speak for themselves already. The night is an experience not to be missed, attended by time-travelling Be Phat Motel, exciting new director Karlind Govender, critically acclaimed photographer Dale Yudelman, Cannes Film Festival darlings Pieter Hugo and Michael Cleary, industry veteran Garrreth Bird and the hypnotically macabre Black Milk Productions. With no entrance fee, the night is sure to have immense value (there will be an opportunity to donate what you think the night was worth).

Many South African filmmakers have no platform to get their films out to you when all they want is to entertain and awe. This is the challenge Karlind Govender and Garrreth Bird found themselves in with their respective films. They got together and decided to make it an event, inviting tip top talent to showcase their productions all together. Two heads are better than one and the theory is no different with six wholly unique films.  Did we mention there is no entrance fee, but you may pay what you feel the night was worth to you.

Enough chat, you must be wondering what you can expect on the night, let me try to tempt you with the following:

Hive by Garrreth Bird
If human nature were a hive, what would our queen be? The idea behind Hive is to challenge the viewer’s perspective on history and what can be learned from the “lesser” order species.

Control by Pieter Hugo and Michael Cleary
Spoek Mathambo is an artist always on the move and in this his cover of Joy Division’s “Shes Lost Control.” With numerous awards, this should be well worth a watch.

Witness by Dale Yudelman
The collective imagination of many is a powerful thing, come see that in action when a burnt out car is discovered just off Long Street.

Anatoemy by Karlind Govender
Karlind’s debut film “Hits the bent nail on the head” says VICE magazine. Promising to be off the wall and absurd, an impression is guaranteed.

Sweetheart by Be Phat Motel
Brought to you courtesy of a time machine, Sweetheart will thrill you with its amazing production value and its vision of our future from the past.

Jornada Del Muerto by BlackMilk Productions
A grim love story that challenges your perspective of death, war and destruction, the film is sure to linger in your mind long after you’ve left your seats.

All in all, One The Boil looks like an exciting night out with the promise of enthralling and enlightening it’s guests. Be sure not to miss it.

ISSUE 14 FEATURES:

• MUSIC & LIFESTYLE: PRETORIA MUSIC SCENE
• PHOTOGRAPHER: PIETER HUGO’S NOLLYWOOD
• ARCHITECTURE: THE ECOMO HOME – LIVE / SLEEP / PLAY
• INTERIOR DESIGN: NEWSPACE THEATRE
• STREETWEAR: ORIGINALS BY ORIGINALS
• STREETWEAR: MEAN STREETS BY NEIL ROBERTS
• AFROCENTRIC COUTURE: AFRICAN WARRIOR
• T-SHIRTS, LINGERIE & SNEAKERS: JUST FOR KICKS
• GALLERY OWNERS: WHATIFTHEWORLD
• ARTIST: CHRISTOPHER SLACK
• PHOTOGRAPHER: CARA GILLOUGLEY
• SHOREDITCH NEON ROCK: KLAXONS
• PSYCHEDELIC GRUNGE POP: MGMT
• BELLVILLE-BASED INDIE ROCK: NEW HOLLAND
• ONE MAN ROCK RENEGADE: THE SICK-LEAVES