Guilt & Innocence

"In 1997 nine artists were invited by the Robben Island Museum to present installations in the visitors’ block of the prison. These were Willie Bester, Kevin Brand, Lisa Brice, Tracey Derrick, Randolph Hartzenberg, Malcolm Payne, Sue Williamson, Lionel Davis and myself. Lionel was a prisoner on the island for seven years for committing acts of sabotage against the apartheid regime. The show was called ‘30 Minutes’ and was curated by Zayd Minty.

‍

For the exhibition we were each asked to create an installation in one of the ten security cubicles that were used when prisoners received visitors. The first cubicle was left in its original state. The political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, were allowed visitors for 30 minutes each month, or each year, at the state’s discretion. This ‘privilege’ was often cruelly administered and some long-term prisoners never received visits for the entire duration of their more than 20 years of incarceration. The nine artists wrote descriptions of their intentions, and these accompanied the installations."

‍

‍^BM

‍

‍

‍

‍

Text Accompanying Installation
Brett Murray

‍

I was born in December 1961, a few months before the Rivonia trialists (Nelson Mandela and his compatriots) were imprisoned. Being born in Pretoria, into a half-Afrikaans, half-English family, where my father’s heritage extended back to include both Paul Kruger and Louis Botha (Boer presidents), disguised by my grandmother re-marrying a Scottish Murray and my mother’s history reaching back to the French Huguenots, I am a white, middle-class cultural hybrid. This was and is my comfortable and uncomfortable inheritance. The political and social forces beyond the confines of my family formed a system which protected and infringed on me, empowered and disempowered me, promoted and denied me. When I looked beyond my private experiences of loves and relationships, family and friends and of boy becoming man, the contradictions in this system, which divided my life from others, resulted in a cross-questioning of responsibility and complicity. This uncertainty challenged the understanding of what became ambiguous life experiences. The photographs document moments of my life within this context, and date from 1962 to 1990, when most of the political prisoners were released from Robben Island.