 for what promises to be a exciting, important, timely, and meaningful conversation. Curators in conversation, tell me what you remember. Which brings together our two exhibition artists, Sue Williamson, LeBahang Hanye, in conversation with our exhibition curator, Emma Lewis. I won't steal any thunder from my colleague, T.K. Smith, but I do want to thank you for being a part of our opening programs and our celebration. I would like to welcome all the Barnes members that are here with us in person. I also should take a moment and thank our virtual audience for being with us this morning. So without further ado, please ask you to join me in welcoming to the stage a new colleague to the Barnes Foundation who has landed and made his presence and contributions very memorable. Please join me in welcoming my colleague, T.K. Smith, assisting curator of Art of the African Diaspora to the stage. Thank you, James. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. I have a very short statement that I'm going to read for you, and then we can get on with this conversation. Why is the Barnes hosting this exhibition? Tell me what you remember. The Barnes Foundation is a cultural institution with an international reach. The collection we steward holds artworks and objects spanning from antiquity to the 20th century with origins from various corners of the world. We introduced to our local audiences, our community, to scholars, to programming, to exhibitions with the hope of mutual growth, our growth as individuals, as a cultural institution, and our hope to grow a wider reaching and inclusive appreciation for the arts as is in our founding mission. As is indicative of the creation of my position, assisting curator Art of the African Diaspora, we are going to address some of the long-awaited needs and desires predicated by the collection itself, such as furthering our critical engagement with African objects in our collection, as well as African histories, the work of African scholars, and, of course, contemporary art created by African artists and those that make up the African Diaspora. This exhibition offers us the opportunity to tell just a few South African stories, both painful and healing through the artwork of two exemplary art makers. In telling those stories, we are reminded that they're not so different from our own. Just to echo the sentiment of my colleague James from last night, this exhibition is so much about elevating the voices of women, the women who make this artwork, and the women who have lived and worked with these women, and raised these women as it is Women History Month. We just want to honor these women who are here with us, as well as the various women whose voices they amplify through their work. Tell me what you remember is curated by Emma Lewis, a modern and contemporary art curator who specializes in photography, specifically photography done by women. She is currently the curator at Turner Contemporary in Margate, England, and it is my great pleasure to welcome Emma Lewis, Sue Williamson, and Lebel Hong Hanye to the stage. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Could you raise your hand if you cannot hear me very well? Sorry, raise your hand if you can hear me. Great. Good start. Thank you. I'd like to express sincere thanks to everybody at the Barnes Foundation because we know it takes a whole village to make an exhibition, but I would particularly like to thank my new colleague, TK Smith, who has really been the most gracious, thoughtful, and incredibly hardworking colleague over the past few months to bring this exhibition into the world with Sue, Lebel Hanye and I, and also to James, who wrote from the very first meeting many, many months ago, has brought the most exciting original ideas to engage and amplify this exhibition in ways that we couldn't have imagined but are so much richer and more extraordinary could ever have hoped. So thank you both. In a moment, I'm going to ask Sue and then Lebel Hanye to walk you through some of the works that are represented in the exhibition. But first, let me just give you the biographies in brief. Sue Williamson was born in 1941 in Lichfield in England and emigrated with her family to South Africa in 1948. In the 1970s, she began to make work that addressed social change and by the late 1980s, she was well known for her series of portraits of women who were involved in the country's political struggle. That body of work is titled A Few South Africans and photographs that went into their making can be seen on the walls today as the series All Our Mothers. Sue is the author of two books including Resistance, Art in South Africa and South Africa Art Now, and her work is held in many international collections around the world. She's also exhibited globally and is shown most recently in her solo exhibition Between Memory and Forgetting at the Box in Plymouth, which is on the south coast of England. Lebel Hanye was born in Cattlehong in Johannesburg in 1990 and received her introduction to photography at the renowned market photo workshop in Johannesburg in 2009 where she completed the Advanced Photography Programme in 2011. She obtained her diploma in Fine Arts from the University of Johannesburg in 2014 and is currently completing her Master's in Fine Arts at Wittes University. Her work is also held in many collections around the world and she's a recipient of notable awards, most recently the Foam Paul Huff Award of 2022, which has resulted in her current solo exhibition at Foam Museum in Amsterdam. Both artists have shown the different degrees in the US but this, we're very proud to say, is the most in-depth presentation of their work in the United States to date. This has been a project that has been several years in the making, a few years in the making rather, the invitation to curate an exhibition for the Barnes Proposal Exhibition came at the end of 2019 from Dr Nancy Eisen, Deputy Director here at the Barnes and at the time I was a curator of modern and contemporary art at Tate Modern specializing, as TK kindly mentioned, in representations of women's histories of feminism or feminisms and how to complicate how that's represented in Tate's collection. And it was broadly speaking through that research that I encountered Sue and LeBerhang's work. At the same time I was also developing a strong interest in oral history and really struck by how oral history and photography share this very particular but very complicated relationship to the idea of truth and documentary and evidence. And that's something that working with both Sue and LeBerhang has really enriched for me personally and I hope will for you as well. There were two bodies of work that I had in mind when this seed for this idea was planted. One was by Sue entitled No More Fairy Tales and explored different generational attitudes between those who experienced the years of apartheid and those who are born in between in the period of the transition to democracy and who fall under this very loaded term born free. The other body of work by LeBerhang called Kela Felaka and really saw her explore, begin her journey of tracing her maternal ancestry and again saw her bridge that generational gap through conversation with the elders in her family particularly her grandmother and aunts. So here then were two artists who were both exploring from their respective position, memory, experience, knowledge, identity and how all of those things are transmitted from generation to generation and also questioning and problematising the role of the artist in that. As our own conversations developed over the past couple of years the focus of the exhibition expanded beyond that of the intergenerational conversation to take in other forms of oral histories. So within the exhibition you will see praise poetry, stories, formal statements, audio recordings, transcriptions, audio recordings many different ways that the artists capture and represent voice or the idea of voice. And so it became really clear to me as it has I think between Sue LeBerhang and I in our conversations that both artists are really convinced of the importance and the urgency of collecting living memories before time passes and it becomes too late. And it's a concept that I think resonates just on a human level this idea of having those conversations while we still can of asking the difficult question of going there. And so there is a certain universality I think to this message but at the same time as there is a wider resonance there is a context specificity here that is so important and urgent even because clearly each of the works in the exhibition speak specifically to the apartheid era the post-apartheid era even with LeBerhang's works works that speak far into their imagined future as well. And so here are two artists that are both exploring the social, political, cultural histories from the perspective of the personal and the familial within South Africa today. And they are histories that I think it's important to say they may have experienced themselves but also may not have and that's something we can perhaps touch on in our conversation. Lastly, just to say that something but plainly really you'll see in the exhibition that Sue and LeBerhang's works are very different and so in thinking about this exhibition and the catalogue that accompanies it, we, myself, the artists, the institution really wanted to take on the complexity of that exchange as we created a cross-generational structure. I think that's enough from me. I'm now going to kindly ask Sue to walk us through how works in the exhibition for the next 15 minutes or so. Same with LeBerhang and then we'll have a few, we'll have questions between us before we turn over to ourselves. Thank you. Thank you Emma and thank you LeBerhang. I'm delighted to be here at the Barnes exhibiting alongside LeBerhang as created by Emma and thank you very much for coming this morning. It's my pleasure to take you through some of the work but we don't want to look at me again. This is one of the works from a series called All Our Mothers. All Our Mothers in the sense being the generation of women who pulled South Africa through apartheid, struggled for liberation. This particular portrait is Caroline Matzueleri. She was the wife of one of the Rivonia trialists alongside Nelson Mandela. Her husband was jailed for 27 years and she was left behind. This is the second time I photographed her. Actually in the top right hand of the photograph you can see the poster of the men who were incarcerated, the famous child her husband is right in the corner. This is Annie Selinger who was famous for refusing ever to carry a pass during the apartheid years. She's photographed here outside her house in Jungle Walk. I knew Annie through being, she was also a member of this organization, the Women's Movement for Peace which was a multiracial women's organization in Cape Town which was formed in 1976 to try and do whatever we could in many different arenas to just try and change things. This is a work called Last Separate Mannevilla and it's a story of District 6 in Cape Town, District 6 being a very beautiful little area, a residential area which was situated on the slopes of Table Mountain but in the 1960s the apartheid government announced that they were going to knock it down. They called it a slum. They said that they were going to move everybody out and redevelop the area for whites. And this series of photographs were taken all in 1981 except for the last one and it reflects the day in District 6, the last day that Eid was celebrated and that's Naze Briam leaning on the wall of her house. As I took the photo I turned around and there were school children walking by so there was still life in District 6 at that stage and neighbors are coming in and the day is being celebrated but an eviction notice has been handed out that very day. A copy of the eviction notice is here at the bottom telling Naze and her family that they have 30 days to move out and Naze is written on the wall of her house. Welcome to the last supper and I was actually collecting also material for an installation at that stage which was going to be just the rubble of District 6 surrounded by six of Naze's dining room chairs and this is Naze against her piano by this time this is a week or so later everybody has written their messages on the wall. This was some years later, this was 1996 so 15 years after the demolition it was part of a public sculpture exhibition in District 6 and I've just done the framework of a house with an old window and on that window is engraved the scene that you would have seen if you'd still been in District 6 and here we have another piece around District 6 and now this is 1993 and I told you the first exhibition I made was using rubble these are the tiny little scraps that were left by 1993 scraps that were lying still in the ground just under the surface and little flakes of paint, a Barbie doll shoe plastic rice packet and these little blocks called mementos of District 6, that was all that was left of the community, this piece is in the collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama but you see it here in Soler, Una and Rome so it's both a house and a little chapel of remembrance this is a piece that you will see on this exhibition it's called The Lost District and this is a final piece about District 6 and it looks much better here at the Barnes than it did in its first showing here in London so I'm happy to say that I'm absolutely delighted with the way it looks here and these windows that you see as if you're standing at a window in a house in District 6 but the windows explode, you're looking at a view but as you're looking at it the window is exploding away from you and I've engraved images from old archival photographs into the glass and they cost a shadow so you see the busy shopping streets, the life of the the little district but it's just a shadow on the wall, it's gone and there I am in my studio it's not hard to engrave but an engraving needle but it is quite time consuming but I thought people might just be interested in the technique this is a work called A Tale of Two Critics this is a detail, it's the story of one woman you'll make a guinea way and her husband who is an activist and who is killed that's the work if you stand on one side it's called A Tale of Two Critics Critic being a small town in the eastern Cape if you stand at it from one side you see the story of the city of Critic well not the story but the tourist guide what you can do if you go, you can play bowls you can go to church, you can send your child to school but it's all for whites and if you look at it from the other side you see the other side of the hill where the black township is hidden away from the white town and the story of the guinea way family some of the photographs I took and others are taken from press or other sources this is a series called Truth Games which recorded some of the cases which came up before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa which was formed when the new government came into power in 1994 and it was decided that what the country needed as a form of healing was to try and discover the truth of all those shadowy cases that we really hadn't known about that what we knew about it but we just knew that somebody had disappeared couldn't be found was allegedly had left the country but we knew that that wasn't really the whole truth so it was an experiment to try to to bring healing to the country and it took place in all over the country in courtrooms the group of commissions travelled around listening to people bringing their stories and trying to find out the truth of all of them so in this series there are three images and each side on the left there's the person who's asking the questions the incident in the middle and on the right the person who's answering the questions and all of these one can find more about these on the Barnes Focus website there's three of them on the wall they're in the Goodman Gallery in London but there are 13 in the series altogether I think what's interesting about the series is that it shows a whole reflection of emotions in some cases reconciliation is reached in the centre one there, Neville Clarence tells the man who has ordered the bomb which is blinded Neville Clarence that he understands that it was just part of the struggle at the time he forgives him, they shake hands Abubak Ismail says that he had to do it it was part of the struggle but he's sorry that Clarence lost his sight so sometimes there's a recognition and in one of the ones that we have here on the show there is that recognition other times the person who's lost a family member feels that they can never forgive a small piece called Memorial to the Truth and Reconciliation of Commission of South Africa it's a memorial, it's standing on a little plinth and the words that came up most frequently during the commission hearings the perpetrators who said that they can't remember they can't remember why they drove to this house why they dragged somebody from under whatever and the people who are asking the questions and they can't forget and the words sort of drop down as if they're falling into memory and this is one of the video pieces which Emma mentioned earlier that particular morning Sia and Gaduka is in a first time conversation with his mother on the subject of his father and that particular morning is the morning that the police knocked on the door of their home and told his mother that his father had been killed in a bomb blast and he's able to... it's been a family not spoken about in the family all these years and he's now in his 30s and he asks for the first time on camera and he hears exactly what happened I think that's perhaps the last one this is the Sawani family from Swear to one of the others in this series it's called what is this thing called freedom which is the question that the youngest member of the family Bushla Bezware Sawani on the right is asking questioning by this time there's a real sense of disillusionment in South Africa nothing much has changed the syllabus in the university is still very colonial the students cannot afford to go many of them who would love to go to university can't afford the fees Bushla Bezware is addressing these questions and at the same time she's hearing from her grandmother Joyce on the left and her mother Bully what their experience of apartheid was so you have two women who went through apartheid and one who is from the new generation and that's just from the beginning it's a photograph of Bushla Bezware against a protest in which she'd participated in which the students marched to parliament for free education and now I'm going to hand it over to Liberkhan Thank you Sue so I will start with one of my recent bodies of work in search for memory which is one of the works that you see soon after into the exhibition and this work I think different to the other works in the exhibition is not around my family history but is a work that I started during COVID and I had been introduced to a book by a Malawian writer Tau River and what that means is Datta Forever and it's basically Nelson Mandela was called Datta which was sort of father of the nation and so in this book it's a sci-fi novel so in the book he sort of is looking at the past the present and the future and imagining a different kind of South Africa and so it continues the theme that I work with in my family in the research around my family history and sort of thinking through the legacy of apartheid particularly as it relates to families and in this book he's he takes us on a journey of this young man who witnesses his father getting killed during apartheid and years later encounters so they're on the farm of this white man where the family was living and working on and he witnesses that as a seven-year-old and then years later I think when it's post-apartheid and he's in his twenties encounters this man and he kills them and then years later this is basically sort of South Africa in the future where Nelson Mandela returns and he sort of finds South Africa burning and the only thing that's remaining is his statue in the Nelson Mandela square and so I found this novel interesting first of all because it was written also by a Malawan writer who's not from South Africa but I was really touching on questions that me as a South African, as a young South African called the sort of born free generation were really sort of questioning around family structures again the absence of fathers but also just the legacy of apartheid on the day-to-day in South Africa and so this is the work is created as these sort of small cardboard cutouts and then I placed them in a diorama so also referencing sort of theatre models referencing also set design and shadow plays so I play with this idea of these items or these elements that are able to be movable also again speaking to this idea of history that's not fixed, of memory that's not fixed and this is in the studio during the construction of one of the scenes for in search for memory and so this work is really where the research around my family story started and so this work was made in 2012, between 2012 and 2013 and it's called her story and it's a work that I started about two years after my mother passed on and I was looking through the family photo albums specifically my mother's photo albums and had realised that a lot of the clothes that she was wearing in these photos were still in her wardrobe and these are photos that were taken of her when she was around the same age that I was when I started this project and as you can see in this image in the image you see me as a one year old baby as a 22 year old and then you see my mother when she was around the same age maybe 29 and I'm in the same clothes that she was wearing and I've taken the photo in my grandmother's yard which is where she had had this photo or where we had had this photo taken and I think different to the other images in this series this is one of, I think it's only two of them where you see me appearing twice in the image so again it continues some of the themes seen in search for memory around time in this idea of the sort of past, the present and the future but also speaking very much to that photography also has the ability to do that but also themes around around loss and exploring that through the medium of photography but also the idea of this double and speaking to I'm just thinking of the book of Jack Derrida who's around Hontology and he speaks about the sort of double loss that takes place when you lose someone that you love and so when I started making this work I didn't think that the work would be becoming a body of work and so it really happened quite organically and so as it developed I mean initially it was, I'd imagined it as sort of two images that live alongside each other and then as the work developed I then created one image from these two images and I am not working and so Mosevitzu Adiriti becomes one of the newest works and it's in the first room that as you enter the exhibition which is the room where both myself and Sue Williamson's works are together in the exhibition and Mosevitzu Adiriti which means the work of Shadows and what becomes a sort of continuation in the research around my family history is the use of the Suzutu language and all the titles that are for works that are around my family all of those are in Suzutu because the work also to large degrees exploring the erasure of languages the erasure of names because the work really started with me going on a search around the family name and so Mosevitzu Adiriti is a work that still continues working with the family photo album in the sense that I've extracted images from the family photo album and then created these larger-than-life fabric works using sort of small pieces of cotton to recreate these images and these are images of my grandmother and great-grandmother and my grandmother's one is central in the sense that it appears or even my great-grandmother it appears in a lot of the other works that you'll see in the exhibition in different ways but also my grandmother was the one who narrated all of these stories around my family history before I then started the journey of tracing the rest of my family and doing all of these interviews and research around the family history and in the first when I first started the research in 2012 I travelled around the country trying to locate my family from stories that my grandmother told me and she also helped me locate some family members that I'd never met before and the research was really centered around the family name and somehow it ended up becoming about my grandfather because he was the first one to move to the city so he refused to work on the farms and he wanted to seek out better opportunities for the family and so he moved to the city and this is during apartheid and years later when my family was able to move to the city when black families could move more freely and this was before I was born so different family members lived in his home in his home before finding their own homes and before finding jobs and so he becomes quite central in the family narrative in that sense so this video piece that you'll see in the exhibition is these stories that I was basically being told about my grandfather and so I'm wearing a suit similar to the one that he was wearing in the photos that I have of him because I've never known him but only through these four photos that I had of him and in the photos he was always wearing a suit and I also got to know him through the stories that my family was sharing with me and so the photos are taken from the family photo albums and then I then create these sets in my studio and basically perform in front of these cardboard cut-out sets as my grandfather wearing a suit and so Murloka Midwatora is a work that really continues some of the questions that I'd started to work on from the video that I just showed so Murloka Midwatora means Lighthouse Keeper so as you'll see in the front the grandfather again and in a suit and again it's taken from the family photo album and some of the other images also of the people in the in the story are also taken from the family photo album and it's, you know, this is one of the four stories that I sort of chose for this installation and this installation is large cardboard cut-outs and I mean when I started the work from the previous series I become really interested in set design and the idea of being able to sort of create a whole world with cardboard cut-outs and so this becomes these four stories that relate to my family name which means Light and because I've noticed that our family name is four different ways I then went on the journey to sort of try and find the correct spelling or the correct name and so this is these different stories that I then collected from the family as they relate to the family name and so it's got two scenes from the city and then two scenes from the village as it's sort of these four different stories from the family members this is from an exhibition I believe in, I think it was Boxes Museum but it's basically how similar to how you'll experience the exhibition and then this is a work that's the last work in the exhibition currently which means Songs of Light and I was I was also, so in this research around the family name I was interested in a sort of oral tradition that's specific to South Africa which is something called Direto which is like a praise poem that each Black Sur name has and so this was, this is something that you would recite at a funeral or at a wedding or sometimes you're doing like a ritual and are sort of trying to summon your ancestors and so Direto was also what, how families were also documenting their family history and their clan names and so I was quite interested in the sort of oral tradition so you know over the last sort of few years doing this research and recording my family members a lot of my aunts and families have recited that to me and so this video piece becomes a continuation of this research around Direto and what you'll hear in the exhibition because the three channel video installation is that this this praise poem is recited by my aunt in the background but also we have a composition of a sound that is of a song with a jazz musician that I worked with or collaborated with who composed a song in relation to this recitation that my aunt is doing and so in the piece it's also about this idea of lighthouses but also the history of lighthouses and how they were meant to get people to home safely but also how they also are quite symbolic in you know in how water was being used for slave trade and for a very violent history and so in this video piece it's this idea of also me continuing my research of the family name taking care of the family history as I'm taking care of this lighthouse as a sort of female housekeeper or an imagined female lighthouse keeper and this is one of the film stills from the film of me cleaning this bulb and taking care of the light Thank you both. So we have about 20, just over 20 minutes left but we have a few questions for you both before we turn the mic over to you in the audience I'd first like to ask about your bring this back to the materials and your practice as artists because it's impossible to talk about your work and to talk about this exhibition tell me what you remember without talking about the social context and the histories but you are engaging with material first and foremost as artists and something that we can see through your work and in your work Lebo is the trace is how you engage with voice differently not only amongst one another but in your own works in each body of work and I'd like to ask you what you found are the opportunities but also the limitations of material media with capturing carrying representing voice Well I think that one can never never actually capture more than a small portion of what the whole picture is I mean I think it's perhaps most evident in my work in the Truth Game series in which these enormously complex cases have been portrayed just in three simple images of the face of the person asking what had happened the person who's answering those questions and the few words that I've taken from the press which are supposed to slide across as you try to reconstruct or imagine the background of the story itself so in a sense it's only a what shall I say a marker of that case if you really you can accept it as something that you can look at at the time and think about but it might be that you'd want to go and investigate much more about it and that's true of all of them I mean the Street 6 it shows some of the streets some of the street scenes that you might have seen in that work the Lost District but you can only just suggest it's just like a lens on a wider world I mean I think when I started working with the Family 4 album what really struck me was how it seemed quite fantastical so it didn't seem like it was really a space for the family history per se as it really was like a space for the family fantasy in the sense that with all of the photos of my mother which were many that in her photo album she was always dressed up and so she was basically like her Sunday best and there weren't any photos of her in her factory workers uniform I mean she works as a factory worker I think since she was 20 up until she passed away and so I became really interested in how and what the function of the photo album or the Family 4 album really was and you know it being a space that speaks to a memory but to a large degree really is a space that was also allowing for an imagined self and a sort of ideal self but was also presenting another side I think to South Africa in terms of South African photography of a very specific time you know also in thinking around photographers that came before me from South Africa where a lot of it was really very much social documentary photography images that were against the struggle against apartheid you know thinking about you know sort of a lot of photogenist that I of photogenist images that I'd sort of come across and so you know really contrasting what I grew up with which were the only really images that I was exposed to were these images in the family photo albums and so I began to think about those two the two ways of photography from the South African context and both of them really becoming around or being about resistance but in two very different ways and so I think I went around You didn't be cute at my next question perfectly so thank you Well I had been maybe anticipating questions because of conversations that we've had with various colleagues and visitors over the past week or so is this idea of the social impetus or the social role of the artwork or artist even you mentioned the documentary tradition in South Africa which we know is incredibly strong and is in large part linked to the market photo workshop which was founded at the end of the 1980s by David Goldblatt with a strong social message about representing particularly the black South African experience and the violence of apartheid you studied at the market photo workshop 20, 30 years later and I'm just curious I have a related question to see I'm curious to know how your attitude personally has changed and if between you and your peers there is actively a kind of resistance to that message of the social function of the work Well I wouldn't say that it's a resistance as it is I think it's a really different moment that when we entered the market photo workshop we were finding ourselves in so from the agenda of starting the space was an important agenda also of giving black people otherwise not have the opportunity to study photography, to have access to photography to be able to document their own communities in the sort of fight against apartheid and so sort of coming in a moment where at the sort of role of to some degree the sort of role of photographers and especially I think my generation our questions were really different and so our questions I think had a lot to do with different conversations around identity and so for me looking at my identity and engaging an older generation I mean so it was a different way I think of still speaking about our history of still addressing social issues but it wasn't we weren't taking photos of you know the same sort of photos as a person like David Goldblatt and the people that had sort of come through the market photo workshop that was created for a very specific agenda but it was still you know it's still falling under social issues and the fact that it you know for me I'm still looking back at these the sort of legacy of apartheid and it's still questions around around apartheid Thank you Sue how does that resonate with you I'm thinking specifically about the fact that those you're part of a generation who received almost like a call to action in the 1980s with the conference for culture and resistance and obviously time has passed since then so how has how has that message received by you at the time and how has it evolved in your work Yes would you mention that conference I think if we look at the history of apartheid in South Africa and think of 1976 as the year that these students since where to rose up against the apartheid government you can think of that as the beginning of the end if you like it was the largest signal that the apartheid government had received that they that the unrest had reached a point of boiling and there's a conference in Cape Town in 1979 called the State of Art in South Africa that was really the first one at which artists came together and which we signed a petition that we would not allow our work to be shown in any government sponsored exhibition again until the universities were open to people of all races because at that point the universities were open to whites or there were separate universities for black students and but a much more significant conference was one which took place in 1982 in Botswana in Chabaroni organised by a group called the MEDU ensemble and a group of activists who were busy making material posters and all kinds of things against apartheid and the title of the conference was I think was culture and resistance towards social development in South Africa and this was really in a sense the first directive that had been given that artists had which was really from the African National Congress who were of course banned at the time that we were to consider ourselves as having a very strong social responsibility that as artists we shouldn't consider ourselves privileged if we'd had an art training that art was for everybody that people should feel themselves free to express their feelings in murals in printing t-shirts in all kinds of different ways and that we had this responsibility to try to bring about change and as white artists even though obviously we could not present the black experience from people who were inside that it was our job to document, to record and to bear witness so I think that was where part of the impulse well it was the impulse that led me to kind of see people who were involved directly in the struggle and to make this first series a few South Africans just one final question how do you think that has continued over the past over the past years as your work has evolved well how it's continued as LeBochung says I mean things changed I mean one doesn't always have as the situation is fluid and in fact my work still tends to work in the area of social development but not always I mean I've done a lot of work which we haven't discussed in this conference which has gone on outside the borders of South Africa but I think it's still a human element and what people say that interests me more than anything else Thank you, thank you both I think we have about 10-15 minutes and we'd love to take your questions, thank you Thank you all if anyone would like to ask a question please raise your hand we will pass you this magic box which will magnify your voice and allow our guests to hear you that the way that just stands is sure Any questions, any questions? Yes sir, we have a question over here I said it was magic I enjoyed the talk and I noticed that when you spoke about the I think it was a lighthouse picture you mentioned that it was accompanied by some music and for many of us music also triggers our memory and I'm wondering if as you perceive with your work if there's any particular music that works along with your memory so for example when you mentioned District 6 I thought of Hugh Nasekela and I thought of Manenberg by Abdul Ibrahim and I'm wondering if that may be true of either of you So the two films that are in the exhibition we've commissioned musicians and I mean the conversations are quite extensive in terms of what music the sort of music that they're composing and the particular period and so the sonic is quite present especially in the film works but the other works like the patriarchs or the photographs those are really silent pieces I think also because it really is so the work has a lot to or references a lot of the conversations that me and my family are having so the conversation to some degree comes through in the titles of the work or in the captions of the works by them being the sort of by some of them taking from some of the statements maybe from the conversation and so the oral and the sonic are sort of present in the works in different ways Well the music for me I mean as you say particularly musicians like Abdul Ibrahim but I mean District 6 was very well known for the musicians that it produced and in fact the Lost District on the exhibition was made by headphones which are on the corners and if you put those on you can hear a tape that I made in 1981 which is the voices of people in District 6 at that time some are happy some are very angry at the state but there are also the songs there are the songs from the carnival and there's the wedding singers singing the song that you would sing at weddings and you'll hear those fragments of songs as well Many thanks for a wonderful, wonderful talk I was curious how you see the role of your art as female artists and shining a spotlight on women contributing to healing and potentially reconciliation in South Africa what role should your art play what role do you hope it plays we talked a little bit about resistance but I'd like to hear about the healing and reconciliation work that's obviously still ongoing there's a person who believes that in talking things out one can reach healing I think it comes through in the series No More Fairy Tales the videos there's one that may be screened at some point later as a separate part of this exhibition called It's a Pleasure to Meet You which is a conversation between Sia and Gaduka and one of his peer group a young woman called Candice Mama both of their fathers have been killed by the same apartheid policemen as a matter of fact and they're discussing it and Candice talks about how she went to jail to visit this man Eugene Dukok and how she hugged him and told him she forgave him and Sia who's hearing this for the first time can hardly believe his ears and says he challenges her on this and he obviously says he doesn't feel the same he doesn't see how he could forgive because if he did say I forgive you it wouldn't mean anything because he wouldn't really have forgiven and in the second one he sort of moved on it was made several years later and he's talking with his mother and he has reached a point of greater understanding so that I do believe that these family conversations and conversation generally can bring a certain amount of healing and closure. I think that healing is definitely at the core of my work I mean the work specifically on my family history sort of started with the loss of my mother and so this journey is about my journey of healing but also my journey of healing through conversations with my grandmother and my sister and so going on this journey has very much been a journey for the three of us through conversations but also through going to the exact locations where my mother was photographed engaging on who's in these photos what do you remember about them and so so much has happened between the three of us that I think has allowed some sort of healing and some sort of conversation that would have otherwise not taken place around the loss of my mother and what that meant for my grandmother who'd lost a daughter in the process and so I think that the journey of healing has really happened through conversation. We do have a question from our audience continuing this theme of healing this question is pointed to you Lebo Lebo Han can you speak about how your work and process demonstrate a healing framework ingrained in collective African historical experiences and communal cultural heritage? You know I think my biggest question I think also around the family structure had a lot to do with the absence of so I don't know if I really had felt the absence of my father before my mom passed away and so questions around sort of the missing father figures in our communities became quite important in that moment and so this journey of trying to explore or engage my family on the men that weren't present in the family had also led me to sort of thinking through the history of apartheid and the sort of separation of families that took place because of apartheid and so I think that the journey has really been more than just about my personal healing but really it's been a journey of really collective healing through conversation again as was mentioning that there's so many conversations that took place between myself and my uncles, myself and my aunts and my grandmother that I don't think I would have really understood why they were absent fathers, how would it take in place beyond what I'd read Any other questions? Yes you? Wonderful talk, absolutely beautiful. My question can be directed towards both of you and it's actually on so we had actually all been talking about this but fragmentation of memory through stress and trauma when we're thinking of these colonial situations coming undone or becoming renewed in the modern day and so my question is around how trauma fragments memory and what's able to be even recollected in a meaningful way so the ways in which we then start to self-curate so when we were talking about how the family album is one that is different than something, it's what is the work of that and I think Bell Hooks talks about the act of curation and black family album specifically in black American contexts and how it is to try to reinvent oneself given circumstance, reinvent oneself outside of the gaze of oppressive forces and or colonial forces and so I wonder for both of you but specifically for Lebanon how you see this work being done in your own recreation and reconnection to family through albums like what kind of work is being done there that then confronts these kinds of wounds I mean I think what what the work also allowed me to do specifically the work around my other images that I went that my mother's images was also to be able to see her in many different lights you know because I'd sort of only known her as mother and so to be able to see her I mean there's photos of her where she's like in her lingerie and which I found really interesting in the sense that also seeing my aunt's photos which were very much similar but also because in my family we never had a camera and so you know they relied on a street photographer to have their photos taken and so the photos that you know where they all of these women in their lingerie this one photographer was basically taking these photos and so and so I found there's so many things that I found quite fascinating also about the sort of access to photography but you know the intention of really performing which I found quite interesting and really relating that to you know the space where you could almost where you didn't have to not didn't have to but a space where you could project you know an ideal self which is not who you are sitting around this idea of memory and fantasy and how that almost lives within the space of family photo albums Well I'm just going to talk a little bit about why I made a few South Africans in the first place because you know I wasn't dealing with my own family history but I was trying to put into the world images of women that I felt were important in South Africa and I made them first as artworks these screened screen printed etched portraits but I also wanted to get them art into the community so I made them into postcards and those postcards became really quite important they were just distributed all over the place in fact I saw a photograph of the Mandela Museum in Soweto the other day there's a set of them up on the wall and they just became these little icons that people could they had a little story about the women on the back of each one so it was just a way of kind of activism if you like of getting images out on the street of people who could serve as heroines and inspire the community you know so it's not really a direct answer to a question but it's an answer to what role to do photographs play in the community and in healing. Time for one more. Anyone else back here? First off I just you know want to thank y'all so much for sharing your work and your personal stories and the stories of bearing witness to stories within the South African community I just had a question as what thinking about young people and young people who are trying to develop their own voice or developing develop their own craft what would be a message you would like young people to walk away from either with your work or from your personal experience in terms of either encouraging voice or finding healing within doing this sort of work I don't know if that's speaking to a younger version of yourself or just talking to the current generation I don't know if that makes sense either but yeah if there's a message that you would give to young people right now. Well I would say to young people young artists who are starting out in the world and have just finished stop worrying about being rich and famous within five years and think about what is really important to you what is the most important thing in your life what interests you the most what would you like to pursue what would you like to share from your own experience your own interests and work on that. So one of the discoveries in one of the conversations that me and Sue had that we made was so Sue comes from a journalism background right and I'd intended on studying journalism when I finished school because I wanted to be a writer and I thought to be a writer you had to study journalism even though I was interested in African literature and you know I think so many years later I have come to realise that what photography allowed me to do studying photography by chance in the way that I did what it's allowed me to do was to incorporate all of my different interests so my interest in sort of writing and storytelling or African literature but also my interest in and performance so I would say that we all have our own sort of language or visual language and it does take time I think to find your own visual language and how that happens also is in you not wanting to do the same thing as someone else you know I think that we all have different stories to tell and we all have important stories to tell and it's just a matter of you know time that allows you to find your own sort of visual own language of communicating your story I will take these final moments to let you know that this conversation continues or has expanded in a beautiful full-color catalogue that accompanies and supplements the exhibition that you can find in the store across the hall here and also if you want to continue listening to a similar conversation Sue is teaching a class here at the Barnes online virtually a four part class called Art in a Partide where Sue will invite different artists her colleagues who and speak about art in a partide post-apartheid South Africa can we have a round of applause for our guest here colleague James Claiborne Thank you TK, a hand for TK he's done so much incredible work in this exhibition and thank you to all my Barnes colleagues that are in the room Julie, Tamir, our friends in the AB booth it's wonderful serving alongside you your attendance tonight also comes with access to this exhibition so we do hope that you will spend a little time with Sue and Level's work while you're here also our collection is open and available to you because the exhibition officially opens tomorrow those of you who have not yet become members of the Barnes and we do welcome you to become members of the Barnes you can probably talk to my colleague Maggie in the back we'd love to talk to you about those benefits you have access to the member preview that's happening today just to facilitate your entry into into the exhibition tell me what you remember you will want to have your ticket for today when you head into the gallery there'll be a welcoming guest representatives those standing at the gallery door if they stop you before you enter and ask about membership do let them know that you were registered for today's talk and they may ask to see your ticket if you have any questions about any of that please feel free to see if Barnes colleagues would love to help you navigate so thank you for being here have a beautiful and safe Saturday if any of you are interested as well tomorrow we have our monthly Pico Free for Sunday Family Day that is the day that's free and open to the public so you may be able to attend that program as well our theme is the art of math so thank you for being here have a great and beautiful weekend and we'll see you next time