Making Art, Making Identity: Moving beyond Racialised Perceptions of Identity through Collaborative Exhibition in the New South Africa

Abstract

This article examines the process of creating a collaborative art exhibition, ‘Dis Nag2 – The Cape's Hidden Roots in Slavery’ (23 September–10 October 1998) which took place at the Slave Lodge (then Cultural History Museum) in Cape Town, South Africa (now the site of a permanent exhibition on slavery, ‘Remembering Slavery’3), as a means through which seemingly separate and particularised histories may be shared and collectively owned across cultural groups, in moving towards a collective national identity for South Africans. The role of the exhibition space is examined as a means of shaping, through praxis, new histories in the present; as well as considering the major tensions and contradictions involved within such transformative processes, with a consideration of how such processes relate to current debates in museology. The study is derived in part from previous research4 examining materiality, shifts in perceptions of self-identities away from racialised constructs in the new South Africa, and focusing on artmaking as a medium for social agency, performance and shifting self-identities for historically disadvantaged artists in Cape Town, South Africa. 2‘It is night’ in Afrikaans. 3For a detailed outline of the process of constructing the permanent exhibition ‘Remembering Slavery’ at the Slave Lodge, which opened in May 2006, see A. Eichmann, ‘Representing Slavery in South Africa: A Critical Reading of the Exhibition “Remembering Slavery” at Iziko's Slave Lodge’ (BA Honours thesis, Faculty of Humanities. University of the Western Cape. 2006). 4N.J. Gibson, ‘Making Art to Make Identity: Shifting Perceptions of Self Amongst Historically Disadvantaged South African Artists’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 2005).