A Digital Safari
The Fuss has been selected to #CreateWithCanon.
Canon South Africa has given us the pocket-friendly Canon Powershot SX600 HS to use for a couple of months; snapping image galleries to give you a look into the things we do, the things we see, the things we create, and the things we love.
In the last edition of this series we gave you a look into one of our favourite contributors to the scene in Openroom Productions. I’m confident and comfortable in my exploration and exhibition of music, but for this post I decided to change things up a bit and challenge myself in getting out of my comfort zone. I decided to visit the Goodman Gallery to view the Post African Futures exhibition.
Curated by Tegan Bristow, POST AFRICAN FUTURES focus is on digital art in Africa. The multi-medium exhibition featuring work by artists from all over Africa “proposes a challenge to art by viewing engagements around communications technology and technology use as a site for critically engaging African identification and a resistance to the globalisation of culture.”
I spend a large majority of my time online and my behaviour on the internet has come to define who I am culturally. Every bit of information I consume online affects me in some way culturally and the line between who I am URL and who I am IRL is unclear. POST AFRICAN FUTURES was probably the best fit for me to get out my comfort zone and attend an exhibition as I am very much a product of the digital age.
There are various arts on display but the most compelling for me was definitely “Sorry for real” by Tabita Rezaire. “Sorry for real” is a multi-medium installation featuring a holographic iPhone which displays a call from the Western World as the narrator apologises on behalf of the western world for all the transgressions they committed in Africa. The installation had me captivated both visually and emotionally.
The ultimate extract from my experience of the exhibition is distilled in a comment by Tegan Bristow in BDLive where she discusses how technology affects, or is affected by, African Culture. “Africa’s only interaction with technology is as a recipient of development and innovation from large multinationals such as Google or IBM. Of course, neither is true.”
Regardless of whether or not the western world apologises, Africans are reclaiming ownership of the African identity and using the internet and technology as a means of equating Africa both culturally and economically.
Check out some of the images I shot at the exhibition below and be sure to visit the exhibition yourself. POST AFRICAN FUTURES runs at The Goodman Gallery in Rosebank until the the 20th of June.
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