Xerography

Marion Arnold in a paper titled Cutting anti-apartheid images: Bongiwe Dhlomo’s activist linocut prints tracks the recurrent theme and ideas evoked by the words black and white and subsequently the colours black and white. Concerning Dhlomo-Mautloa’s Forced Removals series (1982-1983), Arnold describes the “appropriateness of linocut as a process for personal commentary on the disruptive migrations experienced by millions of black South Africans”. In an interview with Michael Godby, Dhlomo-Mautloa relates seeing the black and white reproduced photograph images of the slain Hector Pieterson, carried by Mbuyisa Makhubu and accompanied by Pieterson’s sister Antoinette Pieterson, by photographer Sam Nzima in The World newspaper. Throughout the archive, there are these moments similar to the Nzima image where we are provided with a sense, perhaps a short glimpse into times now past. The white pages, slowing turning to a yellow reminiscent of old dusty papers akin to the imagination of what an archive is, are filled with words and images in black ink. Or in the instance of this archive, many documents are photocopies, and so the black is a result of xerography. Throughout the archive, the black ink on white paper has made us privy to Dumile Feni’s sentiments about being a foreigner in a country not by force but by choice to avoid the immense sadness and hurt experienced by Black people during apartheid. We are made privy to Matsemela Manaka’s sentiments about art by Black artists being sold in Black communities and shown in Black homes. We are made privy to artists who are sidelined and left in the margins by the art history canon. And we are made privy to the fact that it is not only about the white pages and the black ink it is about the socio-political landscape, the apartheid system. A system that to this day works against and not in justifiable conjunction with Black people. A system that is situated in closing out the voices and the creative expression of Black people. Unfortunately, our process of engaging with the archive was halted by the COVID-19 pandemic, as such, there are limited reproductions of the archival documents, most taken as process documentation. The archive is the process of being digitised however this project is not complete and therefore we have been unable to access the digitised documents for further engagement with the archive. We hope that this online exhibition and the subsequent knowledge production from public engagement will result in this archive not receding into the JAG library but that art historians, writers, and artists themselves keep in mind that such an immense resource is available. That in order to understand how apartheid spatial and cultural policies affected the narratives of Black artists we need to go back into the past consistently. 

​

Read more about this in Matshelane Xhakaza's catalogue essay