White Boy Sings the Blues

"We were two years into our new democracy when I exhibited this body of work in Johannesburg in 1996. Many commentators, artists and novelists at the time appeared to be concerned with self-reflection and personal histories. The apparent levelling of the playing fields allowed for this. An internal journey that explored memory and hidden identities became de rigueur.

‍

I produced a series of works that took the head shot as a unifying leitmotif. One group concerned itself with the unfolding Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had been established to bear witness to, record and sometimes grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes involving human rights violations. These works reflected on the difficulty this commission faced of producing finite versions of the ‘truth’. The second group was a little more facetious and challenged cultural dynamics. The image of the invitation was found in a box of slides my parents had stored away. It shows me at an all-white school in Pretoria in 1967. As part of the annual school play my parents had to turn me into a Zulu warrior for a dance sequence and transformed my lily-white skin into an approximation of a black warrior’s complexion.

‍

This image encapsulates the tragedy of the times and, in hindsight, its comedic absurdity. This duality is a cornerstone of my work."

‍

‍^BM