It is difficult to draw a portrait of South
African artist Sue Williamson, whose own art generously grants others a
place in the spotlight. Portraiture is fundamental to Williamson’s projects
as a strategy to restore individual identities to populations that are, more
often than not, shoved into the margins. Her own identity as an artist was
forged during the apartheid era, a time when it was impossible to separate
art from politics. But now, emerging as an internationally recognised artist
in her own right, Williamson’s work can be appreciated as much more than
political commentary.
‘It seemed to me that there was this whole body of people who were not being
seen by the general South African public,’ recalls Williamson, commenting on
‘A Few South Africans’ (1983-5), a series of prints that ironically brought
the artist her first wave of public attention in the mid-1980s. In this
series, Williamson etched and silkscreened portraits of women involved in
the struggle against apartheid – Winnie Mandela, Mamphela Ramphela,
Albertina Sisulu and others – which were reproduced as posters and postcards
that were then publicly circulated, eventually winding up in museum
exhibitions in South Africa and abroad. By then Williamson was already in
her 40s and had worked as a journalist, spent five years in New York as an
advertising copywriter, and returned to Cape Town and raised three children,
honing her skills as an artist along the way. ‘Coming back from New York, it
seemed everything in South Africa had gotten more restrictive,’ she recalls.
‘It made me really feel that one couldn’t just live there without doing
something about it.’
Williamson is now considered a fixture in the South African art scene, not
only participating in the political struggle of those times, but
establishing www.artthrob.co.za, the online magazine promoting contemporary
art in her homeland. She is also the author of two books: Art in South
Africa: The Future Present (1996), which she co-authored with Ashraf Jamal,
and Resistance Art in South Africa (1989). She has not allowed her art work
to remain solely defined by the apartheid era, but it is true that several
of her works are considered iconic representations of the period. In The
Last Supper, made in 1981, and then later Mementoes of District Six (1993),
Williamson created heart-wrenching installations from materials and detritus
found in a neighborhood that had been steam-rolled to clear its 20,000 mixed
race residents from prime Cape Town real estate. A pile of bricks, broken
dishes, scraps of linoleum, shreds of clothing – all given new life as
voices of the former residents while sounds of bulldozers are piped into the
gallery.
In 1990, she made an even more haunting piece out of a relic of apartheid,
For Thirty Years Next to His Heart, copying page after page of one man’s
passbook, turning it into a grid of 49 images that trace his years of
oppression (black citizens were required to carry passbooks at all times and
could be stopped randomly and imprisoned if they did not have proper
permissions stamped in the book). ‘It had ceased to be a legal requirement
to carry these books in 1987, but John Ngesi was still carrying his in an
impulse of fear three years later,’ says Williamson. She asked if she could
borrow it for her project. ‘He said, “well, you can phone me but I don’t
want it back,” as if he didn’t need to have it any more now that someone
else had cut him loose from it.’
After sanctions were lifted against South Africa, Williamson soon found that
works like these had an international audience. She participated in the
Havana Bienal (1991), the Biennale of Sydney (1992), the Venice Biennale
(1993), and the Johannesburg Biennale (1997), as well as numerous
international museum exhibitions. As her world expanded, she found that the
strategies that she had honed in making work that interfaces with political
realities could continue to be effective even as she looked at issues beyond
apartheid and beyond South Africa.
In her most recent work the use of portraiture is even more prominent, as an
aesthetic tool that allows populations that are often reduced to political
symbols to emerge as individuals. One of her latest series, Better Lives
(2003), presents nearly still video projections of immigrants to Cape Town,
posed before a photographic backdrop of the taxi rank in the centre of town.
As they sit there, they and we are listening to a pre-recorded audio track,
a narrative in which the participants describe their lives and the ways that
they came to South Africa. One woman, Deka Farrh, left Somalia pregnant, but
was arrested in Namibia, before managing to escape with her newborn. Another
couple, Albert and Isabelle Ngandu, arrived with almost nothing but had
built a chain of craft stores and had grown prosperous since their arrival.
‘I asked each person to look into the camera while I played their story to
them and I asked them to keep still,’ she explains, ‘but every now and then
you see someone nod or tap their fingers anxiously.’ The success of this
piece is also rooted in Williamson’s sense of being something of a nomad
herself, especially now that her career leads her to places around the
globe. ‘I am rooted in South Africa, not ever wanting to live anywhere else,
but this year I have been in Egypt, in Angola, the United States and
Kinshasha.’ She acknowledges: ‘I pick up and put down quite easily, but that
is because I am always working, working and working.’
‘I think that my early work in newspapers is quite formative in my art work
because of that sort of interest in people’s exact words and precise
narratives, that’s a thread in nearly all of my work,’ says Williamson.
During an artist residency in Egypt, in the El Max section of Alexandria,
she asked residents of this small fishing community to describe their fears
of the impending development of a nearby petrochemical company. The texts
were then painted on to the sides of their house in English and in Arabic, a
public affirmation of the community’s resistance to being moved. Using a
similar strategy, Williamson caused a bit of controversy in her homeland in
2000 when she asked people who were HIV positive to describe their feelings,
painted the words on public walls, then paired photographs of the texts with
photographs of the individuals. In either project, it is impossible to
interpret the work without coming intimately close to the subject.
Williamson never prescribes her audience’s reaction, but she makes it
impossible to view this work and not have a reaction.
Many times these days, people sit and read the news headlines, then turn the
page to rapidly go to the sports section or movie reviews. Williamson allows
her audience to enter a social space where they must spend a few more
minutes taking in a front-page world, filled with wars and other tragedies.
Intimacy, not guilt, is the result of this aesthetic experience, but once
intimate with her subjects, it is not easy to dismiss their issues and
complaints. It is this humanity and her mastery of installation that makes
it impossible to dismiss Williamson’s work as either didactic or
prescriptive. ‘Well, I say my art is drawn from my daily experience, but if
you grow up in a country like South Africa, one cannot help but become aware
of these issues, social issues, and a lot of my work is based on that,’ she
concludes.
Barbara Pollack is an artist and writer living in New York who has been covering the contemporary art scene in Africa since 1998