Post Present Future exhibition: A personal response to history narratives

As South Africa celebrates twenty-five years of democracy, the emerging rhetoric is that the country is a free and democratic state. Plausible as the stories of success in the past 25 years appear to be, there is nevertheless evidence of perpetual oppression, socioeconomic injustice, ill-treatment of women, as well as an apparent silence on the part of the ecclesiastical community on issues of social justice.

Against this backdrop, the UJ Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture academic and UJ 2018-2019 Arts & Culture #LiveYourHeART artist in residence Farieda Nazier, will launch an exhibition entitled Post Present Future, which challenges museum discourse through a personal response to archival displays of apartheid history, and inspires shared narratives in post-apartheid South Africa.

Nazier traces her own memories and personal history through the works to evoke dialogue around shared experiences. She hopes the exhibition will create a space and opportunity to engage, voice and process the lived experiences of racism, patriarchy, violence and classism in post-apartheid South Africa.

“My creative process for this show began with an emotive response to varied troubling stimuli in the museum. My responses are all based on my own or relational experiences and I am essentially interested in the intergenerational consequences or living legacy of colonialism and apartheid. It is very personal, but I see this as a ‘space making’ project, where my role is to facilitate the co-creation of spaces which were previously limited, limiting or non-existent. So, it is really about ways of sharing this museum platform, to allow for voices on the margins to engage with and respond to narrations of history. One of my hopes is that we would then be better enabled to actively participate in the writing and archiving of our very complex and layered contemporary histories,” says Nazier.

The Post Present Future intervention is a sculptural and video-work installation-exhibition comprising mainly individually produced work. The exhibition also features work that was produced in partnership with artists Sarah van Borek and Mogau Mothibe. The art works are positioned alongside or directly overlaid with selected images and artefacts in the museum. Described as a response to the vexed content of the museum’s collection, Nazier seeks to juxtapose “ephemeral representations of personal experiences against a backdrop of a fixed museum discourse.”

The exhibition which includes walkabouts and workshops, will be hosted by Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg on 20 April and runs until 20 June 2019. The exhibition will be coupled with the launch of Nazier’s catalogue presented by UJ Library which will take place on the 24 May.

The Post Present Future project draws purpose from Nazier’s previous projects After Math (2012), Tension Torsion (2014) and Right of Admission (2014 to current) and marries art production, psycho social theories and educational concepts towards a transformative end.

The walkabouts and workshops will take place at the Apartheid Museum on 18 May, 15 June and 20 July from 10h00 – 12h30. To book visit www.uj.ac.za/arts/POST

The exhibition can be viewed at the Apartheid Museum from Monday to Sunday 9h00 – 17h00.