Short Stories in a Longer Tale
Goodman Gallery Johannesburg
20 July - 24 August 2024
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 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 1990, during a residency at the South African National Gallery, I worked on a series of collaborative portraits of women made on a Canon Colour Laser Copier. One of them was struggle stalwart, Ray Alexander, known for her lifelong fight in support of the rights of workers. The six unique ‘original photocopy’ portraits of her were variations of a polaroid taken of her in the gallery annexe.
On being asked to make a chair for a charity auction, I decided to pay further homage to Ray’s reputation for listening to everyone’s troubles by making a chair on which anyone could sit to talk to her. And in the ‘All Our Mothers’ series of portraits, Ray sits in her own chair, as if in conversation with herself.'
Sue Williamson, 2024
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 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.
Cold Turkey: Stories of Truth and Reconciliation, a forerunner to the artist’s Truth Games series, tells the story of the horrific experiments Eugene de Kock carried out to test a cassette player that was also a bomb.
The sudden re-emergence of Jacob Zuma on the national arena is marked by showing again Williamson’s 2014 work, Pass the Parcel, 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.
'In September 1999, I was sitting in a rented room in New York watching the news on an old television set, when suddenly the presenter switched to South Africa and coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission inquiry into the St James Church massacre in Cape Town. Four young and armed black Azapo activists had burst into a church service and fired into the congregation, killing 11 people.
On the screen in front of me, the police were surveying the post-shooting scene in the church. Wrapped bodies lay on the floor. We were listening to the voice of Dawie Ackermann, the husband of one of the victims. To watch this from far off New York was disorientating. I grabbed my Sony Handycam and filmed the screen.
In playback, the technical clash between TV and Handycam became apparent as green bands floated down the camera screen and the soundtrack hissed, but the low tech result had an interesting immediacy.
I printed out frames on my Canon colour laser copier, and added vinyl lettered captions to make this piece.'
Sue Williamson, 2024
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 (b. 1941, Lichfield, UK) emigrated with her family to South Africa in 1948. In the 1970s, Williamson started to make work which addressed social change and by the late 1980s she was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle, titled A Few South Africans (1980s).
Important international solo exhibitions include: Between Memory and Forgetting, Plymouth (2023); Other Voices, Other Cities, Las Palmas (2023); Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget, Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017); Other Voices, Other Cities, SCAD Museum of Art, Georgia (2015), Messages from the Moat, Den Haag, (2003) and The Last Supper Revisited, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. (2002).
Group exhibitions include: Tell Me What You Remember, Barnes Foundation (2023); Breaking Down the Walls - 150 years of Collecting Art at Iziko, Iziko South African Museum (2022); RESIST! The 1960s Protests, Photography and Visual Legacy, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2018); Women House, La Monnaie de Paris and National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington D.C) (2017, 2018); Being There, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, International Centre for Photography in New York and the Museum Africa in Johannesburg (2014); The Short Century, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and P.S.1 New York (2001-2).
Williamson has participated in biennales around the world, including the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2019); several Havana Biennales as well as the Sydney, Istanbul, Venice and Johannesburg biennales.
Williamson’s works feature in museum collections, ranging from the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Pompidou Centre, (Paris), Hammer Museum, (Los Angeles) to the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C), Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town) and the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg). Williamson has authored two books - South African Art Now (2009) and Resistance Art in South Africa (1989).
In 1997, Williamson founded www.artthrob.co.za, a leading website on South African contemporary art and the first of its kind in the country. Awards and fellowships include The Living Legends Award (2020), attributed by the South African government’s Department of Sports, Arts and Culture; the University of Johannesburg’s Ellen Kuzwayo Award (2018); the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship (2011); the Smithsonian’s Visual Artist Research Award Fellowship (2007) and the Lucas Artists Residency Fellowship (2005) from Montalvo Art Center in California. California. In November last year, she took up an artist’s residency at the Yale Center for British Art.
Williamson lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.