Black Photo Album/Look at Me, first exhibited in 1997, is an archive of pictures – commissioned by black South Africans in the early 20th century – and stories about the subjects that challenge fixed ideas of the ‘native type’, a colonial mode of seeing and comprehending photographic representations of Africans. Around 1989, Santu Mofokeng decided to start asking black families if he could make photographic copies of their old family photographs, covering the period 1890 – 1950.

State sponsored publications, like the tourist brochure Native Life in South Africa (1936), seemed intent on portraying black people as resistant to change, perpetually locked into old rural tribal cultures. Mofokeng wanted to recover a different reality, showing the sophistication and richness of black family life, and setting up a counter-archive that has gathered resonance both within South Africa and internationally.

‘These are images that urban black working and middle-class families had commissioned, requested or tacitly sanctioned. They have been left behind by dead relatives, where they sometimes hang on obscure parlour walls in the townships,’ writes Mofokeng in the artist statement that accompanies this series of digitally reworked colonial-era portraits of Black South African families. ‘When we look at them we believe them, for they tell us a little about how these people imagined themselves. We see these images in the terms determined by the subjects themselves, for they have made them their own.’

Mofokeng’s explorations of landscapes invested with spiritual significance form part of a wider enquiry into space, belonging and the political meanings of landscape in relation to ownership, power and memory.

‘In this project I am careful to use the word landscape in its modern meaning and sense,’ he writes in a text accompanying his landscapes. ‘I would like to posit that landscape appreciation is informed by personal experience, myth and memory, amongst other things. Suffice to say, it is also informed by ideology, indoctrination, projection and prejudice. I am looking at the interface of the inner and outer – interior/exterior – worlds, where the objective/subjective environment inform/determine the experience of being at a given time and space. My approach to landscapes is informed by the cleaving the word landscape into its portmanteau component parts: ‘land’ (the verb) and ‘scape’ (to view) in order to illuminate and decode how we view landscape, and that this is based on our experience, knowledge and sometimes, stories.’ (18 July 2008)

SOURCE:
http://cargocollective.com/santumofokeng/filter/work/landscapes.

Santu Mofokeng’s Chasing Shadows series delves into the realm of spirituality and faith.

‘I grew up on the threshing floor of faith,’ writes Mofokeng in an artist statement accompanying this body of work. ‘A faith that is both ritual and spiritual – a bizarre cocktail of beliefs that completely embraces pagan rituals as well as Christian beliefs. And while I feel reluctant to partake in this gossamer world, I can identify with it. It does not strike me as “peculiar”. Yet, I still try to avoid being trapped in its hypnotic embrace, which seems to mock my carefully cultivated indifference and self confidence. I feel ambivalent about my ambivalence, embarrassed at my embarrassment.’

One of the most powerful of his cave images, photographed in the sacred Motouleng Caves in the Free State, is this portrait of his brother Ishmael, made shortly before his death from AIDS. Over the centuries, the site has been a destination for San/Bushman rock painters, sangomas (mediums for ancestor dialogue) and members of African apostolic congregations to perform rituals and conduct worship.

In the 1990s, Mofokeng made numerous visits to Motouleng, where a famous woman healer called Mantsoupa from King Moshoeshoe’s time in the troubled 19th century is believed to be buried. Two years prior to his death in 2006, Ishmael, who had become a sangoma, insisted on visiting the caves to participate in these ceremonies in lieu of Western biological treatments.

‘Ishmael’s portrait is called Eyes Wide Shut, because of its reference to sexuality. Ishmael’s family – wife, young children – all died,’ writes Patricia Hayes in the journal History and Theory. ‘In his photographic portrait at Motouleng there is already a film coming over his eyes.’

‘The title of Mofokeng’s Chasing Shadows series derives from the Sotho word seriti or is’thunzi, whose multiple meanings range from ancestry and ritual to aura and status. Mofokeng describes it as an “exploration of notions of personhood … my exploration and participation in the fictions we call relationships and community. And of environments, real or imagined”.’

These words translate powerfully into images like Concert Sewefontein (1989), in which Mofokeng’s focus is much on the shadows as the subjects.’ – Hazel Friedman, Mail & Guardian.

SOURCE:
http://mg.co.za/article/1997-06-27-catching-souls

This image is one of many that evidence Mofokeng’s lifelong investigation into the meaning of landscape. In 2007, he was awarded a fellowship by the Ruth First Foundation to investigate climate change and worked with journalist Leonie Joubert, visiting places that were affected by climate change.

‘For many years Mofokeng has worked on the boundaries between the material and the immaterial. This means that sometimes the material shades into the immaterial, and vice versa,’ writes Patricia Hayes in Chasing Shadows (Prestel, 2011). ‘In his recent work on climate change, there is a new set of boundaries. These are between the elements: water, earth, air and fire.’

Here, a deserted country road stretches out into the stormy distance, the blurred horizon confusing vision. The indeterminacy of the image is part of its strange metaphorical force. In its bleak and foreboding mood, Mofokeng’s photograph recalls Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic novel, The Road.

This image from Mofokeng’s 2007 Climate Change series was included in the exhibition Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa, curated by Karen Milbourne, which showed at the National Museum for African Art, Smithsonian Institution in 2014. It was included as part of the section ‘Art as Environmental Action’ in which artists’ concerns about environmental issues were explicit.

Grainy and inchoate, it is difficult to determine where the sand ends and the sea begins. The mood of the image is sombre, foreboding and apocalyptic. Although photographed in Durban, the content of the image transcends the specificity of its geography, becoming a transferable cipher of imminent environmental disaster.

Mofokeng’s explorations of landscape invested with spiritual significance form part of a wider enquiry into space and belonging, the political meaning of landscape. He uses photography to investigate the meaning of landscape in relation to ownership, power and memory.

In this photograph, we see a bus and a car following a small procession of people through an open field; the familiar sight of a South African funeral. The mourners have had to hire a bus to get to the place where the funeral is taking place, evidencing the geographic dislocations of migrancy and the journeys mourners make to be physically present for the burying of the body of a loved one in home soil.

This enigmatic photograph of a horse grazing in a forest was taken at the Buddhist Retreat in Ixopo and is part of the series ‘Magic and Disease’.

‘Mofokeng has a string of eerie photographs of things that may or may not be what they seem: the priest at Motouleng who might be a devil; the grazing horse with no head; the sacral goats on top of one another,’ writes Patricia Hayes in Santu Mofokeng, photographs: ‘the violence is in the knowing’ (History and Theory, 2009).

‘This is beyond conjuring otherness from the ordinary. There is a strong thematic throughout Mofokeng’s work about things not being what they appear, achieved mostly through a lack of sharpness, blurring, or the highlighting of extraneous detail or objects in a scene. But in these three cases he is using exactitude to blur the very identity of things. They are photographed as he finds them in space and time, but to be misread into something much more sinister and inhuman, un-animal, or Other. Perhaps they are “mutations of nature”. These photographs are not reassuring; this is not humanist photography. Their spiritualised context creates a break in expectation, and opens up the mind to other worlds, not the material secular one, and not even a normative spiritual one. This work ruptures realism, and there is doubt in the very heart of the alternative realm.’

Mofokeng’s series Chasing Shadows is an exploration of a landscape invested with spiritual significance. Some of the photographs from this series document caves used both as a Christian prayer site and a place of traditional healing. Here, Mofokeng invites the viewer to explore the meaning and the use of the landscape and environment for ritual and ceremony.