About the Young Afrikaner project by Roelof Petrus van Wyk roelof.vanwyk(at)trigger.co.za
A Constructed Documentary Project on the Young Afrikaner.
This project Documents the Reclamation of the Afrikaner Identity by the Young Afrikaner Individual. A Massive shift from a State Owned, and Sanctioned, National Identity during Apartheid, to a Self-determined, Narrative, Plural and Personal Identity, steeped in Culture – Language, Music and Visual Arts – has occurred during the last decade. This group finds itself wedged between an inherited Caucasian/ European-, and a new African Nationalist worldview. Weaving these two worldviews into a coherent social-, political- and cultural reality is an ongoing existential challenge.
NEW:
Victoria and Albert Museum Installation, April 2011
This group has been politically marginalised in a post-apartheid, post-colonial Africa,yet identifies as “African” through the recognition of their role in its tumultuous and violent history, their physical relationship with the land, their embedded cultural memory and perhaps its removed distance from ancestral Europe (and now the Caucasian world view too), as the only white tribe on the dark continent.
However, the individuals are global citizens, influenced by global trends and fashions. They engage knowingly with the international issues of the day, participate in the global economy, travel and work abroad.
This project is also one of the first where the documentarian is from within the group itself, not only representing the group, but also defining his own personal vision of an Afrikaner through his choice of individuals.
In this massive shift, the Afrikaner has now taken, and owns, its identity, its image, and continues to challenge traditional perceptions about it, growing and exploring the meaning of freedom in a world of human equality.
Contact: roelof.vanwyk(at)trigger.co.za
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NEW!:
Becoming-Afrikaner (A Deleuzian perspective)
by Mollie Painter-Morland (March 2011)
What does it mean to “be” Afrikaner? In this exhibition, this ontological question is stretched to its limits. Not in the sense that it seeks an answer to the question, but rather that it enacts the impossibility of the question as such. The images collected here do not address the question: Who IS the Afrikaner? But rather responds to the more serious challenge and charge: What happens in this becoming-Afrikaner? What becomes of them, who are figured as Afrikaners, but yet in their singular engagement with landscape, relationships and materiality, defy the identity construct and challenge one to look, and think again.
The challenge to the ontological category is performed at various levels. In the first place, it disrupts the molar categories of what is traditionally associated with “the Afrikaner”. Instead, it functions at a molecular level to both accept and move beyond what is expected in terms of the political, sociological and anthropological form and function. The conservative, repressive, somewhat backward connotations with the typical identity construct cannot be denied. And yet these images are not a polemic against it, because that, of course, would acknowledge and solidify precisely what it attempts to deny. Instead, each image explores the visceral quality of the particular individual’s lived qualities. Nature and culture coincide here, with disease, age, and accident leaving its traces, and grooming and deliberate markings enacting an engagement with time, space and individual history.
In its engagement with the material, the boundaries between self and other, self and object, self and the inanimate are suspended, albeit for a moment. The individual portrait does not perform a mimetic resemblance to some familiar artwork, or religious relic, but becomes it, for a moment, just to mess with one’s belief in the symbolic. It draws one into an experiment with what could possibly be, despite one’s group designation, maybe even precisely because of it. Because there is something, a category, the disjunctions become jarring. “But this person is not!” “Surely cannot be”… And in this “cannot”, the “IS” is defied and the “BECOMING” becomes possible. Not as a negation, but as an affirmation. It is a saying YES to connection, to the messiness of living, to the kind of experimentation that marks one, whether by default or by design.
This collection is just that, a collection, of the artist becoming-Afrikaner. Growing into his own molecular possibilities in and through his connections with others, within a landscape, engaging with a history that is both familiar and foreign at the same time. Yet it is not a biography, as it has no definitive plot. It has a rhizomatic structure, which explores the possibilities of others as lines of flight, creative escapes, through which the self becomes itself, yet no self. There is an artist here, but one that even in his careful design, technique and composition, remains a side-product of what happens. Fortunately, because it would be kind of tragic if after all this we could only say: Roelof van Wyk IS an Afrikaner.
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Latest Exposure:
NEW! FROM BLACK AND WHITE TO FULL COLOUR: A CURATOR’S JOURNEY
TAMAR GARB, CURATOR OF FIGURES AND FICTIONS THE V&A EXHIBITION OF NEW SOUTH AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHY REFLECTS ON HER CAPE TOWN UPBRINGING AND THE FORTHCOMING SHOW
http://www.vam.ac.uk/channel/people/photography/tamar_garb_-_figures_and_fictions/
NEW! Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography 12 April – 17 July 2011, V&A, London
The first UK exhibition of contemporary South African photography from the last ten years will be shown at the V&A this spring. Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography will feature over 150 works by some of the most exciting and inventive photographers living and working in South Africa today.
The exhibition will present the vibrant and sophisticated photographic culture that has emerged in post-apartheid South Africa. The works on display respond to the country’s powerful rethinking of issues of identity across race, gender, class and politics. The photographs depict people within their individual, family and community lives, practicing religious customs, observing social rituals, wearing street fashion or existing on the fringes of society. All the photographers question what it is to be human at this time in South Africa.
The 17 photographers in the exhibition range from established practitioners David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng, mid-career stars Pieter Hugo and Zwelethu Mthethwa to a new generation, fresh to the international stage, including Zanele Muholi and Hassan and Husain Essop. Each photographer will be represented by one or more series that imaginatively question the conventions of portraiture, ethnographic studies or documentary photography.
Co-curator Martin Barnes said: “This exhibition will show the range and variety of politically-engaged fine art photography arising from a captivating period in South Africa’s history. These photographers are at the forefront of photography emerging anywhere in the world today and we are delighted to gather them all together for this first major exhibition showcase of the contemporary South African scene.”
All aspects of life including sex, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, occupation and class were regulated by law until the end of Apartheid rule in South Africa in 1994. For nearly 50 years the separation of races was enforced, with people categorised into ‘black’, ‘white’ and ‘coloured’.
As the first wave of post-apartheid euphoria has begun to fade, the country’s photographers are responding to the challenges of establishing a pure democracy in South Africa’s fascinating and fraught political context. Many of the works represent subjects who compose themselves for the camera, asserting new-found dignity and distinction. Some works in the exhibition reference the types of anthropological study that was historically used to classify people into fixed racial and ethnic groups after photography arrived in South Africa in 1840.
In the struggle against Apartheid, photography was used by activists as a documentary medium and contemporary South African photographers self-consciously engage with this history by documenting South African life but also inviting the viewer to read their own stories into the works.
Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography is co-curated by Tamar Garb, Professor of Art History at University College London and Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at the V&A.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/resources/press_releases/index.html
http://media.vam.ac.uk/media/documents/press-releases/2010/v&a-figures&fictions.pdf
http://www.artsouthafrica.com/?news=305
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Spier Contemporary Finalist 2010
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“Drawing Links” Group Show, Art on Paper, 2010
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Atri Documentary Festival, Italy, “After A” – Group Show curated by Federica Angelucci.
http://www.reportageatrifestival.it/eng/?p=141
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International Photo Awards, Lucie Foundation, Deeper Perspective Finalist, 2010
http://www.photoawards.com/en/ + http://luciefoundation.org/
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Historic exposure:
Photographic Group Show, PhotoZA, 2003
SHOW US WHAT YOU”RE MADE OF (ii) Group Show at the Premises 2004
Merit award winner, New Signatures 2004
Finalist, New Signatures 2005
Brett Kebble Awards Finalist 2005
Spier Contemporary Finalist 2007
About the Artist:
Full name: Roelof Petrus van Wyk
Contact: roelof.vanwyk@trigger.co.za
Current residence: Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
Date and place of birth: 11 March 1969, South Africa
Education / training: B.Arch (UP, 1995), South Africa
Brilliant concept, a dialogue worth engaging in!
From a fellow contemporary Afrikaner.
what is a contemporary afrikaner?
What is an Afrikaner? Thats the question to be answered before you drag the name into the here and now..
I have read alot why there are white people in South Africa. It was the europeans who came to to the Cape in 1652. The Ducth people who made a camp there on the way to India. Alot of them stayed in the cape and became farmers.- It was really a misunderstanding.! Africa was a black continent, and Europe a white ditto. Later the british indvaded South Africa. And yes, to day your are white africaners qua the history. -Otherways you still would be europeans.
I am european and scandinavian, from Denmark
Dankie
very honest work
As an outsider looking in, having recently enjoyed a brief encounter with the intriguing city of Capetown, I have to commend you for your honest and interesting work here. Thanks for creating this fine work which has stimulated dialogue and I hope further deepen my limited understanding of a culturally diverse country plagued by the fall-out of systemic racism.