Sue Williamson Dossier 2024

Sue Williamson: Short Stories, in a Longer Tale
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
20 July - 24 August 2024

Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Short Stories, in a Longer Tale, a solo show by Sue Williamson, marking thirty years since her first solo show at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in 1994, an exhibition which won her the Vita Art Now Award for best exhibition in South Africa that year.

Since then, Williamson has continued to exhibit all over the world, and last year had solo shows at The Box Museum in Plymouth, UK, titled 'Between Memory and Forgetting'; at the Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas, titled 'Other Voices, Other Cities' and a two-person exhibition with Lebohang Kganye, at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, US, titled 'Tell Me What You Remember'. A major retrospective of her five-decades long career will open at Iziko South African National Gallery on 19 February 2025, titled 'There’s something I must tell you: a retrospective.'

In Short Stories in a Longer Tale, Williamson sources news media and archival references to unpack six key moments in South and West Africa’s complex and layered history, using printmaking,  photography, drawing, video, embroidery and installation in her incisive work. 

The Diaries of Lady Anne B (2011) delve into the personal papers of Lady Anne Barnard, wife of the first British Colonial Secretary to govern the Cape from 1797-9. A watercolourist of note herself, Lady Anne comments caustically on domestic matters: a hangman who does his job just outside her drawing room windows, a mutiny at sea, distinguished visitors to the Cape, thus giving a unique view of life at the time. For this series, Williamson collaged monoprints with calligraphic notes from the diaries to tell these lively anecdotes. 

In 1900-2, Britain once more tried to regain control over her old colony, sending 400 000 soldiers to quell the Boer republics. The embroideries in the Stories for Children (2023) series are based on the illustrations in My Anglo-Boereoorlog Storie-Inkleurboek, a colouring book bought in the gift shop at the Anglo-Boer War Museum (now referred to as the South African War) in Bloemfontein in the late 1980s. The pictures and text in the book attempt to explain the horrors of that war to a child. Echoing the pictures in the colouring book, the images are hand-embroidered in black cotton on to white organdie; a labour relating to the handmade toys made by the women in the British concentration camps. 

The brave activism of women in the apartheid years, 1948 – 1999, has been a key focus for Williamson. Taken from her All Our Mothers series is a photographic portrait of struggle stalwart, Ray Alexander, known for her lifelong fight in support of the rights of workers. This is echoed by the installation, 'A chair for Ray Alexander' that pays homage to Alexander’s reputation for always listening to others. Sitting with her chin on hand in a listening position, Ray seems to be inviting the viewer to sit down and tell her their troubles. Six unique colour laser printed portraits form a backdrop to the chair. A second activist, Nyameka Goniwe, widow of the assassinated leader Matthew Goniwe, is the focus of Cradock: Caught in the Flood.

With the onset of the 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission, long hidden truths emerged: Cold Turkey: Stories of Truth and Reconciliation (1996), a forerunner to the artist’s Truth Games (1998) series, tells the story of the horrific experiments Eugene de Kock carried out to test a cassette player that was also a bomb. Untitled (St James Massacre) records in low res a TRC hearing filmed on a Sony Handycam from an ancient TV set in New York.

The sudden re-emergence of Jacob Zuma on the national arena is marked by showing again Williamson’s  2014 work, Pass the Parcel (2007), Jacob which followed the story of his rape trial through a series of newspaper cuttings highlighting the uneven power dynamics between Zuma and his accuser. 

Looking further back on the continent’s timeline, the ink drawings series Postcards from Africa is based on photographic postcards sent in an era of colonial expansion. Here the artist redraws the landscapes and situations imaged in these old photographs, but the people who once stood so stiffly in many of them are no longer required to be present.

Sue Williamson: Between Memory and Forgetting
The Box, Plymouth, UK
4 February - 4 June 2023

Curated by Nicoletta Lambertucci

For over 40 years, Williamson’s work has celebrated the underrated realisations of women, who played key roles not only in the liberation struggle, but in the years that followed. The artist speaks of her work as a ‘generational circle’ as it aims to bring these women and their histories to a wider audience, while also connecting the societal changes they allowed with the lives of their granddaughters and the younger generations.

​The series A Few South Africans and All Our Mothers shine a light on the empowering stories of these women. A Few South Africans is a series of mixed media portraits, the heroines of the liberation struggle, while All Our Mothers is a parallel series of photographs dating from 1981, both in black and white and colour.

​Williamson also focuses on the historical past, considering the events that form a background to the present. Colouring In reproduces every page in a child's colouring in book bought by the artist at the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein, South Africa in the 1980s.

​A new sculptural commission, titled Towards Another World considers the significance of memorials in the life of the community; those who are honoured, and those who do not receive a mention. The proposed monument is presented as a fragile, ruptured entity, calling into question the way in which history has been memorialised in the past.

​Between Memory and Forgetting is an exhibition that speaks about liberation struggles, those who are not memorialised due to power hierarchies and the role and recognition of women who have fought and are still fighting for a more equal society.

A Few South Africans (1980's)

Sue Williamson expressed:

"Made at a time when South Africa was still firmly under the grip of apartheid, A Few South Africans was a series that attempted to make visible the history of women who had made an impact in some way or other on the struggle for freedom. The ‘Few’ in the title referred to the fact that they were a small number of many who were involved in this struggle. At that time, the faces of these women never appeared in the popular press, and little was known about them. Many of the photos of the women on which the photoetchings were based I took myself, but others were sourced from banned books in university libraries, or other sources." 

All Our Mothers (1981 - 2022)

All Our Mothers is an ongoing series of portraits of women that began as a photographic archive documenting the turmoil within early 1980s South Africa. The work was revisited in 2012 - as were some of the women who were involved in the liberation struggle - with new portrait photography. The series marks the passing of time, as the older photography taken on black and white film moves through to the more recent colour digital photography. It celebrates the strength of the extraordinary women who helped to bring this country to freedom, and examines the generation gap between these wise, iconic veterans of the struggle, and their granddaughters, the confident young born frees. 

There’s something I must tell you, (2013)

Williamson’s multi-screen video installation There’s something I must tell you portrays six intense conversations in which the older women recall important moments of their histories and their lives, and the younger women respond, and present their own forthright views on living in South Africa right now. Stories of exile, of the women’s march, of imprisonment evoke the ultimate question: Was it all worth it? The answers are sometimes surprising. In making the series, Williamson worked with such key figures as the charismatic Amina Cachalia, the distinguished Dr Brigalia Bam, the 101-year-old Rebecca Kotane, Carollne Motsoaledi, widow of Rivonia triallist Elias Motsoaledi, Ilse Fischer, activist daughter of Afrikaner lawyer Bram Fischer, and liberation movement heroine Vesta Smith. 

Colouring In (1992)

The basis for this work is a children's colouring in book, the title of which translates to 'My Anglo Boer War Colouring In'. The resulting work mixes the book's original illustrations with archive images, drawing parallels between the oppression suffered by Black South Africans during the Boer War and later under the Apartheid government.

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Towards Another World (2023)

In this exhibtion, one of the questions artist Sue Williamson asks is who is honoured in times of conflict? She explores this through the lens of South Africa, the country with the turbulent history she’s called home for most of her life, but it’s a question that is universally relevant. A new sculptural commission in the exhibition brings this to the fore.

Towards Another World measures seven-metres high and is suspended above the floor. It’s constructed from steel struts and covered in embroidered panels – a combination of strength and fragility. 

The panels feature scenes from a 1980s colouring book that Afrikaner parents would have used to try and explain the Boer War to their children. They also include an image of Emily Hobhouse, a Cornish-born welfare campaigner, anti-war activist and pacifist. She was sympathetic to the plight of the Boer and African people, and brought the British public’s attention to the deprived conditions inside the concentration camps that had been built to incarcerate them. The work takes as a starting point two memorials dedicated to those who lost their lives in the war - the first in Plymouth, UK, and the second in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The title of the work is from the sentence engraved in the Boer War memorial on the Plymouth Hoe.

Monument I and Monument II (1981)

This pair of screenprints mark the beginning of her preoccupation with monuments, and the way in which people in power try to tell and celebrate their stories for future generations.

In the first print on the left, a statue of President Kruger can be seen floating past the Voortrekker Monument on a pastel-coloured background. Cartoon hearts have been added above them to indicate mutual admiration. In the second print on the right, a revolution has arrived. The sky has gone dark, a huge rain cloud hangs over the Voortrekker Monument as it’s struck by a bolt of lightning, while President Kruger can be seen tumbling from his plinth.

Fittingly, the prints are exhibited directly opposite a new sculpture titled Towards Another World, where Williamson has revisited the idea of a monument. Towards Another World deconstructs the idea of a solid structure built for eternity, and instead takes the form of a framework, suspended above burnt branches and rubble – items that suggest the detritus of war.

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Sue Williamson: Sue Williamson & Lebohang Kganye: Tell Me What You Remember
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
5 March - 21 May 2023

Three decades after the dismantling of apartheid began, South Africa's so-called "born free" generation has reached adulthood and its artists have used their work to navigate their difficult inheritance. At the same time, the historical distance between their experience and that of an older generation grows. Tell Me What You Remember reflects on this moment by bringing together two of South Africa’s most acclaimed contemporary artists.

In their respective practices, Sue Williamson (b. 1941) and Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990) incorporate oral histories into films, photographs, installations, and textiles to consider how the stories our elders tell us shape family narratives and personal identities. Implicitly and explicitly addressing legacies of racial violence and social injustice, their work offers a cross-generational dialogue on history, memory, and the power of self-narration.

Curated by Emma Lewis, curator at Turner Contemporary, Margate, England.

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That particular morning (2019)

That particular morning brings together two dual-channel videos from No more fairy tales, a series of filmed conversations, which highlight the reality of daily life in South Africa twenty years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

The TRC was set-up in 1996 by the South African government with the aim of initiating a healing process within its grief-stricken society. Taking the form of a series of hearings, the commission’s mandate was to bear witness to, record, and in some cases grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes relating to human rights violations, while offering victims the chance to share their stories. In 2015, as student unrest swept across the country, it became apparent that many of apartheid’s wounds remained unhealed.

These events have subsequently sparked fierce debate in South Africa regarding the state of our society. That particular morning, Williamson’s most recent film in her No more fairy tales series, is in collaboration with Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka. Mgoduka is the son of policeman Mbambalala Glen Mgoduka, who was killed in December 1989 by a car bomb planted by the apartheid state. In this film, Mgoduka asks his mother Doreen questions he has carried for many years, bringing to light issues of forgiveness, loneliness, respect, and the differing attitudes of two generations toward the processes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.

Sue Williamson and Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka, That Particular Morning (2019) Trailer

Sue Williamson and Lebohang Kganye: Tell Me What You Remember

Edited by Emma Lewis. Contributions by Sue Williamson, Lebohang Kganye, Sindiwe Magona, Portia Malatjie, and Nkgopoleng Moloi. 

Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, 2023.

This book brings together two of South Africa’s most acclaimed contemporary artists to reflect upon this moment. In their respective practices, Sue Williamson (b. 1941) and Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990) incorporate oral histories into film, photographs, installations, and textiles to consider how, just as formal statements determine collective histories, so the stories our elders tell us shape family narratives and personal identities.

Exploring the complexities involved in the passing down of memories, their works implicitly and explicitly address racial violence, social injustice, and intergenerational trauma. This richly illustrated catalogue features essays that consider themes of voice, testimony, ancestry, and care, and a dialogue between Kganye and Williamson that explores how art can mobilize the healing powers of conversation.

Sue Williamson: Can't Remember, Can't Forget 
George Bizos Art Gallery, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa
21 March - 31 May 2017 

A major retrospective with two new video works. 

"The journey through the museum itself, is heavily structured: in the main exhibition halls, a set route leads viewers through a series of metal gates which must be opened one by one as the visitor goes through the galleries, past a series of multi media displays of the events, the atrocities, the heroes and heroines and the collective protests which mapped the rise and fall of apartheid. It is impossible not to be profoundly moved.

In contemplating these graphic reminders of our past, as a South African, it is also impossible not to be deeply saddened at the way in which by 2016, the possibilities of a new dispensation with opportunities for all in a more equal society have been trampled upon by those in power. The rule of law is ignored in favour of greed and abuse of public office.

To the youth of today, the Nelson Mandela whose presence is so powerfully recalled in the Mandela Remembrance Centre at the museum is a leader who was too eager to please, to reconcile with the white oppressors, and who failed to negotiate terms which would have led to a real shift in economic power.

And this is why the opening of the new art gallery at the museum, which leads off the Remembrance Centre and has been named for the legendary lawyer George Bizos is so significant. It allows the museum, under the directorship of veteran curator Christopher Till, to move beyond the purely documentary and the historical and provide a space for reflection through art on problems and conundrums of the contemporary, thus adding another level to the experience of those visiting the institution.

It was an honour to be the first contemporary artist to be invited to exhibit in the new space, which can be adjusted and adapted in many different ways. Five hundred square metres can be divided into separate areas with 25 movable columns." - Sue Williamson (2017), taken from the artists diary 

Truth Games, 1998

"the Series attempts to consider the role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the healing/not healing of post-apartheid South Africa through a series of interactive pieces. Each piece pictures an accuser, a defender, and an image of the eventin question. At no time are all three images visible, as text taken from the transcripts and printed on slats obscures sections. Viewers are invited to slide these slats across different parts of the images to conceal or reveal parts in an attempt to replicate the action of the country in trying to decide whether the truth is being spoken or still hidden. In my work, I attempt to re-contextualise issues of contemporary South African history. By mediating through art the myriad images and information offered for public consumption inthe mass media, I try to give dispassionate readings and offer a focus and new opportunities for engagement. Art can provide a distance and a space for such considerations." - Sue Williamson (1998)

Sue Williamson, It's a pleasure to meet you (2016) trailer 

Sue Williamson: Other Voices, Other Cities
The SCAD Museum of Art, Georgia
8 October 2015 – 31 Jan 2016 

The SCAD Museum of Art presents  Other Voices, Other Cities an exhibition with works from an ongoing series by artist Sue Williamson. Since 2009, Williamson has explored the definition of place to cities and citizens. In this age of globalization, what does it mean to live in a particular place? Why do the residents of a city choose to live there, and if there but is one message to express the essence of that city, what would it be?

In each new city, Williamson works by setting up a workshop of young artists and other residents, asking them discuss what distinguishes their city and the people of that city from any other. What is good, what is bad, what is peculiar? If the city has an image and an attitude, what is it? At the conclusion of the workshop, participants vote on the most popular statement.

The letters of the statement are fabricated in cheap signage material, and Williamson finds a location in the city appropriate to the message for a photo shoot. On the day of the shoot, the workshop participants meet again and hold up the letters to spell out the message for a word-by-word series of photographs.

At a time when much of the world is in constant flux, the dialogue created by residents of different cities is engaging and revealing. Cities represented in Other Voices, Other Cities include Havana; Johannesburg; Harare, Zimbabwe; London; Bern, Switzerland; Berlin; New York City; Krakow, Poland; Napoli, Italy; and Istanbul. During 2013 Williamson completed a residency at SCAD Hong Kong, and in collaboration with SCAD students, she created No Time to Stroll, the most recent addition to the series included in the exhibition.

Sue Williamson: Messages from the Moat
Archive Building, Casuarie Str., Den Haag.
2000

Curated by Jan de Lange of the Stichting Kunstmanifestasies 

"From 1658 – 1700, under the first colonizers of the Cape of Good Hope, the Dutch East India Company, more than 1500 Transactions involving the buying and selling of enslaved people were recorded. In Messages from the Moat, each of these transactions is represented by one bottle, with the details engraved on the side of the bottle." - Sue Williamson 

Sue Williamson: The Last Supper Revisited
National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.
12 January - 27 January 2002

"First day in Washington DC. I'm here to install my work The Last Supper Revisited at the National Museum for African Art, part of the Smithsonian Institute. The piece is about the demolition of District Six and dates from 1993. It is a follow-up to an installation I made in 1981 at a time when District Six was still being demolished, in which I took raw demolition materials - doors, windows, books etc - and plonked them in the middle of Cape Town at the pristine Gowlett Gallery, surrounded by chairs draped in white. A tape, recorded over a six-month period, played the voices and sounds of the district. That was The Last Supper. In the second version, tiny fragments of rubble are encased in clear resin blocks and placed on a round glass table with concealed lighting. Photographs of the Ebrahim family, owners of the dining room chairs used in the first installation, are placed in light box windows around the walls. In these three photographs, the family is seen celebrating Eid for the last time in their home in District Six.

The work has, of course, come ahead of me in a series of crates, and on this first morning I am met by the assistant curator for contemporary art, Christine Mullen Kraemer, and taken up to the exhibition space. The walls have been painted soft grey, according to a colour swatch sent ahead, and rubdown letters are being applied to announce the title of the exhibition. The big problem with transporting the work from South Africa to Washington has been the difference in voltage - the piece depends for illumination on dozens of little halogen lights in the base of the table. I had a new transformer built in Cape Town to cope with this, but here at the Smithsonian the electricians are struggling to get it all to work. When I inquire if the cable from the centrally placed table will run across the floor, Alan Knezevich, the exhibition designer, tells me airily that no, they have drilled a hole right through the floor beneath the table for the cabling to go down to the level below, so it will be completely invisible! I am staggered by this extraordinary attention to detail, and the willingness of the museum to drill into a carpeted floor" - Sue Williamson (2002), taken from the artists diary 

Aperture - Two South African Artists Reflect on the Memories of Apartheid

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Frieze - The Memory Work of Sue Williamson and Lebohang Kganye 

Read Here 

ArtReview - Sue Williamson’s Funereal Vitality: A new show at The Box, Plymouth presents a careful overview of a career dedicated to memory and colonial injustice

Read Here

In Conversation: Sue Williamson and Lebohang Kganye (moderated by Nkgopoleng Moloi)