Sue Williamson

In 2009, South African artist Sue Williamson convened a workshop during the Tenth Havana Biennial on what it means to live in the Cuban capital. Now encompassing thirteen total regions, “Other Voices, Other Cities,” 2009–, is a series wherein Williamson produces group photographs of workshop participants holding letters spelling out phrases expressive of their collective beliefs. In Havana, the phrase read, “The blockade is also in the mind,” and in 2009 in Johannesburg, “Who is Johannes?” The latter work appears in this show and is also the cover image of her new monograph. She held another workshop at the Paris launch of the book last January, and included here is the picture Fluctuat Nec Mergitur: The Boat Will Not Sink, Paris, 2016, made on Place de la Bastille of participants displaying the titular English phrase, a variation on the capital’s Latin motto.

Studded with older works such as Pass the Parcel, Jacob, 2007, a collection of twenty-one news clippings documenting South African president Jacob Zuma’s 2006 rape trial, this exhibition shows photography to be a good point of entry into Williamson’s extensive oeuvre. Much of the artist’s work follows an evidentiary imperative. Williamson’s series “From the Inside,” 2000–2004, for instance, is here represented by a diptych portrait of artist Benjamin Borrageiro alongside his statement, painted on a public wall, lashing then president Thabo Mbeki for his wayward theories: “I’m sick of Mbeki saying HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.” Social justice and accountability is evident too in a new series of five etchings on glass, “The Lost District,” 2016, and related drawings in progress in a gallery window, all portraying parts of District Six, a mixed-race neighborhood demolished during apartheid and now the site of Cape Town’s vibrant new gallery scene.