Testimony
Sue Williamson | Testimony
Goodman Gallery London
March 11th - April 24th 2021
Head-Image
Truth Games series
Truth Games: Melanie Magmoed – brother shot – Dolf Vermeulen
1998
Laminated colour laser print, wood, metal, plastic
Work: 84 x 121 x 6 cm
AP 1/1
In the late afternoon of October 15 1985, security police hiding in crates on the back of a lorry opened fire on children playing in the road in the working class suburb of Athlone, Cape Town. Shaun Magmoed (16) and two others were killed, and nearly 20 injured in what became known as the ‘Trojan Horse’ shooting. Police said they had opened fire because the children were throwing stones. Scores of witnesses denied this. The police, under the command of Lt. Dolf Vermeulen, defended their action, saying it was ‘a necessary technique to protect ordinary road users’.
Truth Games: Nqabakazi Godlozi – dumped in river – Kimpani Mogoai
1998
Laminated colour laser print, wood, metal, plastic
Work: 84 x 121 x 6 cm
STD 3/3
Qaqawuli Godlozi was one of three leaders of the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation (Pebco) abducted by security police from the Port Elizabeth airport on May 8, 1985 and taken to a remote spot where they were killed. Their remains were thrown in a river, and when the truth came out, 20 years later, the families held a memorial service next to the river, throwing flowers into the water. Kimpani Peter Mogoai and seven security policeman appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, seeking amnesty. Mogoai expressed his deep regret over what happened, and said he wished to be reconciled to the families.
Truth Games - Graca Machel - prokoved disaster - Magnus Malan
1998
Laminated colour laser prints, wood, metal, plastic
Work: 84 x 121 x 6 cm
AP 1/1
Many people, including Graca Machel, still believe that the plane crash which killed her husband, Mozambican President Samora Machel, was in some way provoked by the SADF. At the TRC hearing into SADF operations, ex-head General Magnus Malan asserted that he had never given orders for such operations.
Truth Games: Mrs Jansen – can never forgive – Afrika Hlapo
1998
Laminated colour laser print, wood, metal, plastic
Work: 84 x 121 x 6 cm
STD 3/3
Mr Jansen was the victim of mob violence in Crossroads, Cape Town, when his bakkie was overturned and set alight. He died the following day. Seeking reconciliation, Afrika Hlapo, jailed for the killing, said his intention had been to seek a better world for South Africa, and expressed his desire to meet with the Jansen family, a request refused by the widow.
Truth Games: Neville Clarence – hold no grudge – Aboobaker Ismael
1998
Laminated colour laser print, wood, metal, plastic
Work: 84 x 121 x 6 cm
AP 1/1
Neville Clarence was an officer of the South African Air Force when he lost his sight in a car-bomb attack on the SAAF headquarters in Church Street, Pretoria, in 1983. More than 200 people were injured in the attack and 19 died. The attack was perpetrated by Umkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. At the TRC hearing in May 1998, the current Chief of Policy and Planning in the Defence Force, Aboobaker Ismael, took full responsibility for the attack. Clarence said he understood the circumstances, and the two men shook hands.
Truth Games: Liezl Ackermann – not a church – Gcinikhaya Makoma
1998
Colour laser prints, wood, metal, plastic and perspex
Work: 84 x 121 x 6 cm
STD 2/3
In July 1993, five young members of the APLA – the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, attacked the congregation of St James Church, in Kenilworth, Cape Town, and 11 people died. Marita Ackerman, mother of Liezl Ackerman, was one of them. The only member of the group convicted of the attack, Gcinkhaya Makoma, was granted amnesty in June 1998.
Truth Games: Joyce Mtimkulu – to ash – Col. Nic van Rernsburg
1998
Colour laser prints, wood, metal, plastic and perspex
Work: 84 x 121 x 6 cm
STD 2/3
Siphiwo Mtimkulu was an Eastern Cape student jailed for his consciousness-raising activities. He was fed rat poison in jail, his hair fell out, and he was made to stand on two upended bricks for hours on end. He was hospitalised, then released. Soon after his return to home in 1982, he disappeared, and his abandoned car was ‘discovered’ by the police near the South African border. At the TRC, the police admitted responsibility for killing him and burning his body, but his mother, Joyce, still did not believe she had heard the whole truth.
Truth Games: Linda Biehl - understand the context - Mongezi Manqina
1998
Laminated colour laser prints, wood, metal, plastic and perspex
Work: 84 x 121 x 6 cm
STD 1/3
Amy Biehl was a 26-year-old American Fulbright Scholar working at the University of Western Cape, near Cape Town. Dropping off friends in the black township of Gugulethu during a schools boycott in April 1993, Biehl was stoned and stabbed to death. Four men were found guilty of her murder and sent to jail the following year; in 1997 they applied for amnesty, claiming the murder to be politically motivated. Biehl's parents Linda and Peter, supported amnesty for the killers, saying that they understood the context in which she was killed. The four were granted amnesty and released.
Truth Games: Joyce Seipei - as a mother - Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
1998
Laminated colour laser prints, wood, metal, plastic and perspex
Work: 84 x 121 x 6 cm
STD 1/3
In one of its most closely followed hearings, the TRC attempted to establish the degree of culpability of Winnie Madikizela Mandela, known during the apartheid years as ‘The Mother of the Nation’ in the death of teenage activist Stompie Seipei at the hands of the Mandela Football Club. At the urging of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mandela finally admitted that things had ‘gone horribly wrong’
Truth Games (1998), is an interactive series of works in which the artist highlights a series of cases brought before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). As an activist, Williamson closely followed the TRC hearings and was directly involved with one of the cases.
Truth Games brings together courtroom photographs of accusers and defenders, positioned across from one another and divided by an image reflecting the crime, with all imagery and text drawn directly from newspaper accounts of the hearings. Phrases given in evidence are printed on perspex slats, piecing together accusation and defence. Faced with the terrible truths of apartheid brutality broadcast by the TRC hearings, many white South Africans said 'I did not know'. Truth Games allows viewers to engage directly with the work, sliding the slats over the images to reveal what is beneath.
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1. The TRC (1995-2002) was created by the new democratic parliament to investigate gross human rights violations that were perpetrated during the period of the apartheid regime from 1960 to 1994, including abductions, killings and torture. It brought the victims of apartheid face to face with the perpetrators with the intention to bring closure.
It's a pleasure to meet you
2016
Two-channel video installation with stereo audio
Variable Dimensions
Edition of 5
The dual channel video work It’s a pleasure to meet you (2016) brings two young people - Candice Mama and Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka - into dialogue for the first time whose fathers had been killed by the apartheid police. The title of the work references the greeting that Mama’s father's killer, apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock, gave each member of her family when they visited him in jail.
Sue Williamson and Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka
That particular morning
2019
Two-channel video installation
Variable Dimensions
Edition of 5
The follow up video to It’s a pleasure to meet you (2016) , is called That particular morning (2018), which was made in collaboration with Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka. Here, Mgoduka is again a participant, and, on camera with his mother Doreen, he vocalises the questions about his dead father that he has held back for years. The work brings into focus the profound impact of this familial rupture and highlights differing generational attitudes towards the process of forgiveness initiated by the TRC hearings.
Referring to her practice, Williamson says: “ I am interested in objects, often very humble ones, and the stories behind them. I am interested in the media, in the subtext that runs behind newspaper reports, and in books which may seem mundane like a tourist guidebook. But most of all I am interested in people, in their stories, and in the exact words they use to describe their memories, experiences and expectations’. Williamson has avoided the rut of being caught in an apartheid-era aesthetic, constantly re-assessing changing situations, and finding new artistic languages to work out her ideas.
District Six: Museum Case # 1, Constitution St
1993
Found objects in casting resin and perspex case
Work: 44 x 102 x 12 cm
For the 'Museum Case' series Sue Williamson visited the site of the area formerly known as District Six in Cape Town, which had undergone forced removals during apartheid. Williamson gathered fragments of various objects that had remained in the area following demolition and cast these fragments in small resin blocks.
‘The pieces both celebrate the liveliness of the community that once was, and are also an indictment of a society which allowed a community to be destroyed until there was nothing left but inert fragments. We are used to seeing fragments of pre-Columbian clay figures or Roman glass displayed in museums – but in my role as fake ‘museum director’ I have preserved these fragments of a community which was very much alive only fifteen years before the piece was made.’ - Sue Williamson
For the 'Museum Case' series Sue Williamson visited the site of the area formerly known as District Six in Cape Town, which had undergone forced removals during apartheid. Williamson gathered fragments of various objects that had remained in the area following demolition and cast these fragments in small resin blocks.
‘The pieces both celebrate the liveliness of the community that once was, and are also an indictment of a society which allowed a community to be destroyed until there was nothing left but inert fragments. We are used to seeing fragments of pre-Columbian clay figures or Roman glass displayed in museums – but in my role as fake ‘museum director’ I have preserved these fragments of a community which was very much alive only fifteen years before the piece was made.’ - Sue Williamson
A Tale of Two Cradocks
1994
Archival pigment ink prints on cotton rag paper, wood, extruded acetate
and brass hinges
Work: 43 x 500 x 25 cm
Edition of 10
Contracts to 43 x 100 x 25cm
A Tale of Two Cradocks looks at the story of the Goniwe family as told in an interview with the artist by Matthew’s widow, Nyameka. It is the story of how the couple met, got married, had children, and of how Matthew died.
Matthew Goniwe was a respected teacher and a charismatic popular leader, who became targeted by the apartheid government. One night in June 1985, he was intercepted by the police at a road block. He and his three comrades were pulled out of the car and shot by the police. Their bodies were burned. A photo from the police files shows two policemen leaning over the bodies. The fax (in Afrikaans) ordering the ‘removal’ of Goniwe is superimposed.
Cradock, the home of the Goniwe family, is an outwardly charming small town set
in the Eastern Cape, but in the apartheid years, life there for the black and white communities took place on either side of an almost unbreachable wall. In the 1980s, the guide book the visitor could collect at the tourist bureau in town talks of the churches, the schools, the sporting facilities – available only for whites – but does not mention even once the name of Lingelihle, the black township adjoining Cradock.
The deconstruction of seemingly innocuous public documents is one of the interests of the artist. The form of A Tale of Two Cradocks functions as a screen – somewhat like apartheid, you can only see one side of the ‘tale’ properly at any one time, depending on where you are standing.
The Lost District (2016 -). Set against a wall drawing of the map of the old district, hand-engraved glass 'windows' and painted brass signage works derived from photographs recall the daily fabric of life in District Six. The delicate white lines of Williamson’s incised glass show up in the crisp grey shadows cast on the wall behind the work: the shapes of these buildings’ re-inscribed presence - like the accounts of the collaborators in Williamson’s films - offer renewed clarity to a history not so far removed from our present.
Overlooking the harbour and spilling down the slopes of Table Mountain, Cape Town's legendary District Six was once home to 60 000 people -a lively and tightly knit working class community many of whom were descendants of slaves, and were now merchants, seamstresses, carpenters and other artisans, gangsters and professionals. Immigrants added to the mix, and there were strong traditions of musical performance and sport.
People of all colours lived there, but in 1966, the apartheid government declared the District for whites only, and in 1968, demolitions started. Bulldozers systematically smashed down fine Victorian buildings, rows of neat cottages, cinemas, like the British Cinema, cafes, streets of shops, the fish market and the public wash-house. By 1981, almost nothing remained, and the community, once so vocal, had been silenced.
Today, the barren land shows little sign of reclamation, still haunted by the ghosts of the past. Floating against a pale blue street map of the old District Six, Sue Williamson's installation The Lost District recalls and commemorates the life of the disappeared community. Steel framed 'windows' give skewed street views derived from archival photographs, hand engraved by the artist into glass. The incised white lines seem delicate and ephemeral, but throw a sharp grey shadow onto the wall behind.
Street signs, with their quirky typography, are reproduced in brass, and recall the bustle and richness of daily activity. Fresh produce was on offer at the Enternial Cafe, open until late, and Lerties Fisheries was one of the many small glass fronted shops which made up the fish market. Laundry facilities were available at the public wash-house, and music shops sold the latest releases on record labels, like Decca. Cinema going was a favoured past time, and the British Cinema, which opened in 1932, was followed by the Star, the Avalon, and the National.
But it was the strong sense of neighbourliness and mutual trust that bound the community together. As one resident recalls, 'There won't come again a place like District Six. It was a wonderful place.'
Of all the communities destroyed by forced removals by government decree, District Six, located as it was near the centre of Cape Town, has retained the strongest hold on the public imagination It is important to remember, though, that it is just one of many such communities bulldozed in the name of ideology, not only in South Africa, but in many countries around the world.
The Lost District: Hanover Street
2016
Hand engraved glass and steel frames
Work: 78 x 66 cm
The crowded shopping street of Hanover Street was the spine of District Six. It started near the Cape Town Castle at its lower end, with buses taking passengers at a sharp angle through the district, past the shoe and fabrics shops, the Star Cinema, and the fish market. The slopes of Devils Peak could be seen at the far end. The handsome Hanover Building, on the right side of this work, was built in the early 19th century by famed Dutch East India Company architect Herman Schutte as his own home.
The Lost District: The Wonder Store
2019
Hand engraved glass and steel frames
Work: 83 x 47 cm
Work: 73.5 x 55 cm
Located at 101 Hanover Street, the Little Wonder Store, otherwise known as the Wonderwinkel, supplied socks, woollen caps, scarves, handkerchiefs, table linen, haberdashery, and a 'treasure trove' of other items which could be sold directly to shoppers or ordered through their catalogue.
The Lost District: Tip Top Hairdressing
2020
Hand engraved glass and steel frames
Work: 68 x 71 cm
'Hair is everything' said one District Six resident. 'It has to be perfect from the roots to the tip'. The Tip Top Hairdressing Salon, on a busy corner of Hanover Street, was one of a number of salons catering to customers anxious to achieve such perfection before their appearance at the next dance, beauty pageant or party.
The Lost District: The Corner of Roger and Lee Streets
2019
Hand engraved glass and steel frame
Work: 81 x 76.5 cm
Right in the heart of District Six, residents who lived in the neat cottages at the corner of Roger and Lee Streets were just a few minutes walk to the the Fish Market, the Public Wash House, and the famed Seven Steps, the district’s favourite meeting place.
The Lost District: Pontac Street
2020
Hand engraved glass and steel frames
Work: 74 x 57 cm
Work: 75 x 53 cm
Two women gossip amongst fluttering pigeons at the corner of Pontac Street, backed by a row of the neat cottages typical of District Six. Washing hangs on balconies in the background, and in the foreground, a ladder suggests that roof work is needed.
The Lost District: The Fish Market
2019
Hand engraved glass and steel frames
Work: 81 x 58.5 cm
Work: 87 x 77.5 cm
The fish market in Hanover Street was fronted by a row of small shops, each of which offered fish caught daily by the local fishermen, who themselves lived in District Six. There were two main seasons: the season of the small fish, such as harders, followed by the season of the big fish, particularly snoek, the fish most loved by Sixers, who would often serve snoek pickled in a spicy sauce
The fish market in Hanover Street was fronted by a row of small shops, each of which offered fish caught daily by the local fishermen, who themselves lived in District Six. There were two main seasons: the season of the small fish, such as harders, followed by the season of the big fish, particularly snoek, the fish most loved by Sixers, who would often serve snoek pickled in a spicy sauce.
Signs of the Lost District: Decca Records
2020
Patinated brass and painted aluminium
Edition of 5
Signs of the Lost District: Enternial Cafe
2019
Painted brass
Work: 36.1 x 86.5 cm
Edition of 5
Signs of the Lost District: Lerties Fisheries
2019
Painted brass
Work: 27.8 x 62.8 cm
Edition of 5
Signs of the Lost District: British Cinema
2019
Painted brass
Work: 14.2 x 99.8 cm
Edition of 5
Signs of the Lost District: Public Wash-House
2019
Patinated brass and painted aluminium
Work: 10.9 x 190 cm
Edition of 5
