"Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life" at Munich's Haus der Kunst examines the legacy of the apartheid system through visual records, including rarely seen photographs. Pictured here is Jodi Bieber's image of a protest against the assassination of Chris Hani - a fierce opponent of apartheid - on April 10, 1993.
The exhibition highlights the different strategies adopted by photographers and artists, from social documentary to the appropriation of archival material. Eli Weinberg's photograph depicts a crowd near the Drill Hall on the opening day of the Treason Trial in Johannesburg on December 19, 1956. The trial ended with the acquittal of 156 anti-apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela, in 1961.
Alf Khumalo's image shows crowds and police officers outside the Palace of Justice during the Rivonia Trial in 1963. Ten leaders of the African National Congress (ANC), one of them Nelson Mandela, were charged with 221 acts of sabotage. "This is the struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and experience. It is a struggle for the right to live," Mandela said in the dock.
Exhibition curators Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester propose that South African photographers didn't show African citizens as victims, but as agents of their own emancipation. Gille de Vlieg's image, taken in Johannesburg on October 18, 1985, shows the memorial service for poet Benjamin Moloise, who had been hanged earlier that morning. His mother is on the left and Winnie Mandela is on the right.
Resistance to apartheid became militarized after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 when police opened fire on a group of black protestors, killing 69 people. In 1985, ten youths were killed by right-wing extremists when violent unrest broke out in the township of KwaThema. This photograph by Gille de Vlieg shows coffins at the mass funeral held in KwaThema on July 23, 1985.
A fundamental argument of the exhibition is that apartheid changed the visual language of photography, that South African photographers employed the medium as a means to overcome the lines of segregation between whites, blacks and non-Europeans. Pictured here is Greame Williams' image of Nelson Mandela with wife Winnie upon his release from Victor Verster Prison in Paarl on February 11, 1990.
Featuring more than 600 photographs, artworks, films, books and assorted archival documents, the exhibition traces visual responses to apartheid from 1948 to the first non-racial democratic elections in South Africa in 1994. Photographer Greame Williams took this shot at an election rally in a Soweto football stadium that year. "Rise and Fall of Apartheid" runs through May 26, 2013.
"Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life" (15.02-26.05) at Munich's Haus der Kunst offers a comprehensive historical overview of pictorial responses to apartheid.
"Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life" (15.02-26.05) at Munich's Haus der Kunst offers a comprehensive historical overview of pictorial responses to apartheid.
