Local artist goes beyond the borders with ‘unearthing’ exhibition
Local artist, Isabel Katjavivi opened up her exhibition ‘unearthing’ at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg gallery last week.
The exhibition which explores sites of trauma during the colonial era and creates a response to commemorate the ancestors, will run until February 2020.
Katjavivi uses the earth, exploring the soil as an entity that retains memory and stands witness and uses the invocation by James Baldwin, that ‘All your buried corpses now begin to speak’ as a call for a reckoning with histories left in the land.
Unearthing is an extension to Katjavivi’s 2018 exhibition, ‘They tried to bury us’ at the National Art Gallery, which created a scene of remembrance to those killed in the Ovaherero and Nama Genocides in Namibia.
Unearthing include voices of the descendants and connects to the loss of land and the current realities caused by the unresolved resonances of the genocides. The exhibition is the second exhibition in the series Izwe Plant Praxis, curated by MadeYouLook is being accompanied by a discursive programme.
