(Mike Khali - Untitled (Miners) 1987 pencil and pastel on paper.Coll: Ifa Lethu Foundation)Exhibition curated for the Ifa Lethu Foundation running at the Durban Art Gallery from February 16 to March 30.
For the last five years the Ifa Lethu Foundation has been instrumental in repatriating South African art that was produced during the apartheid years but which found its way overseas due to the fact that there was no market for the work of black South African artists in the country at the time.
The exhibition Home and Away: A Return To The South explores this previously lost artistic heritage alongside the Art Against Apartheid collection. Curated by Carol Brown, former director of the Durban Art Gallery and now an independent curator, the show examines the similarities and differences between works produced by South African artists experiencing the oppression of apartheid and those from beyond our shores who created works in support of the struggle. Although produced from different perspectives, the two collections are united in their focus on human rights.
The exhibition was first shown at Constitutional Hill in Johannesburg where the historic nature of the space – once a prison, now the supreme symbol of justice in South Africa – provided a highly appropriate context for the two collections. It then moved onto the Iziko Museum - Michaelis Collection Old Town House an equally significant space as it usually houses the Dutch collection. This, with its colonial reminders, was an elegant and beautiful building which showed the collection in an equally interesting manner.
The show recently received a full eight-page feature in the prestigious Art in America journal where the well-known art critic and writer, Steven Dubin, who writes that "Representing, literally, the return of the repressed, the Ifa Lethu cache offers a rich vein of material yet to be fully explored, and holds the potential to substantially expand our perceptions about South African art history."
The Durban Art Gallery is situated on the second floor of the Durban City Hall, entrance in Anton Lembede (formerly Smith) Street opposite the Playhouse. More information on 031 311 2262/6.
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