Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Markers of Presence, an exhibition of colour photographs by David Goldblatt. In the late 1990s Goldblatt began exploring the use of colour in his personal photography. Prompted by a new political dispensation in post-apartheid South Africa, as well as technical advances in digital reproduction, Goldblatt felt that colour best captured his feelings about the time.

Goldblatt’s colour photographs are collected under a wide-ranging essay, Intersections, a body of work  made between 2001 to 2012, subsequently published as Regarding Intersections and Intersections Intersected.  This work included explorations of land and landscape, people, towns and monuments - all held together by Goldblatt’s fundamental interest in our values as a society, and how we express those values in the marks we make and leave behind.

Markers of Presence presents a cross-section of photographs from Intersections. In light of the searching spirit that preoccupied Goldblatt during this period, the exhibition brings together five currents that underpin the series.

i. Fuck All Landscapes

ii. Fences

iii. Possession and Disspossesion

iv. Mortality and Memory

v. Multiple Views

Markers of Presence is on view at Goodman Gallery Cape Town (10th June - 31st July 2021)

the names

by Maneo Mohale

26.1511° S, 28.3696° E                                                                                                                                                                                           

time is nothing but tongue & tundra. both are known to me, as are The Names. I alone recite them, as beads on a rosary. thumb over finger, finger over thumb. omniscient as the clicking of my own teeth in the night. Black names: inscribed as they are now, as ochre passing over the swartberg. I alone know them. I care for them, despite the camera’s open-mouthed gaze. they hum beneath me—Black as the land’s true face. nothing of the carceral is bound to survive. look now: how the mountain arches its back against time. how it turns away finally, uninterested.

26.3651° S, 28.1526° E        

blood loops its way over the dry grass & splits itself into the mother & the father. the farm is deserted. its flow is gated by iron & wire. all things eventually yield themselves reluctantly to the light. this is the camera’s un-whispered threat—it’s deepest comfort & absolution. it is the mirrored machinery’s click, anointed & made clean by white light. such terrible things have been done in my name. they are fed to me, only to descend into The Archive of my stomach. destined to rot there, like looped blood Blackly thickening to feed & fatten pale hands.

28.2750° S, 26.1478° E 

death tightens itself to this soil, promised to us by men & blood. it is the only ribbon that binds the desk to the dust. the spine that straightens both. the same jackal that ran its ears through the fynbos is strung up by its back-paws on barbed wire. isn’t this interesting? decay: whispered to us—close as a lover’s teeth, imminent as the secret of my own tongue. they have left the jackal hanging like this, as a warning.

“this is what they do,” she said, but only to me. “they have nowhere to dump their pain. it is as blue as that asbestos from owendale that blows itself over our beds at night. it is trying to kill us slowly. it is the horror hiding in everything that they have done. they have eaten the earth, they have swallowed our songs, they have burned our ancestors’ eyes. they hate the land that even now, claims us back as her own.”

34.0084° S, 18.4662° E       

a record tries to remember but the Black earth spits him out like a seed. he cannot discard himself, so he looks around & manipulates the light. he does not know of the ocean that churns between history & memory. between what happened (what is happening?) & what we capture of it. he does not care. through a thin fence, he searches for his own face, fixating on a pig’s heat. unaware of his own discovery. instead, he hums: look here, isn’t this interesting?

30.1426° S, 27.4674° E   

a child’s finger resting on his little lip, like a bee. a mother’s earned & unowned halo. black hands over white plastic, tugging braids into existence like poems. my father’s golden parker pen. mined from a false promise: it’s easier to live better with ellerines. berg-en-dal’s obsidian monument—broken into two & then two again.

how dare you say that there are no angels in this part of the sky?