PUBLIC ART/PRIVATE LIVES

Abstract

This essay traces a body of work, as it emerges in the space between visual art and an engagement in the public sphere. A range of projects and exhibitions, using photography as medium, is described in the context of a discussion about the complexity of the photographic transaction. All of these projects explore notions of intimacy, pushing at the boundaries between ‘the private’ and ‘the public’ in the South African public cultural domain. The essay focuses particularly on Hotel Yeoville (2010), a participatory public art project-based online and in the library of the old Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville. Yeoville's estimated 40,000 inhabitants are largely disenfranchised migrants and refugees from every part of the African continent. The project comprised a website and an exhibition space with a series of digital, interactive booths in which members of the public were invited to document themselves through mapping, video, photography, text and social media applications. The essay reflects upon the performative, evocative and expressive potentials of the media platforms that could be accessed through the Hotel Yeoville installation and in this particular social and political context asks questions about the photographic encounter and its relationship to self-representation, truth, knowledge and power.