Seafarers All

EXPLORING THE MARITIME WORLD as the unseen matrix of globalization, Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s The Forgotten Space (2010) begins as an investigative documentary and concludes as a mythopoeic essay on modernity and the sea. Along with the quickening staccato of the accordion sound track, the film’s rhetorical intensity slowly builds as metaphor and allusion are interwoven with the facts and conditions of global trade.

In one of the final scenes, we learn that Doel, a small Belgian village, is being demolished to expand the port of Antwerp. In one shot, we see a street that dead-ends in a dike

picks September 22, 2010

Zwelethu Mthethwa

Isolating one motif from a broader body of work by Zwelethu Mthethwa, this exhibition brings together his pictures of domestic interiors. Nearly all the large-scale color photographs on display were taken in shacks and hostels inhabited by migrant workers living at the edges of South African townships. For example, the “Interiors” series, 1995–2005, consists of portraits of individuals and occasionally a pair of what seem to be brothers, sisters, or cousins, in their lodgings. The deliberate poses, formal dress, and attention to pattern all draw on the studio portraiture of earlier African