Goodman Gallery presents Testimony, a solo exhibition by British-South African artist Sue Williamson. This exhibition, which marks Williamson’s first solo presentation in the UK, spans the artist’s seminal 1990s series through to recently completed work.
Williamson is part of a pioneering generation of South African artists who challenged the apartheid government from the 1970s and has been represented by Goodman Gallery from 1993 - the year she held her first solo exhibition at the gallery for which she won the 1994 Vita award for best exhibition in the country in the previous year.
Beginning this exhibition is Truth Games (1998), an interactive series of works in which the artist highlights a series of cases brought before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). As an activist, Williamson closely followed the TRC hearings and was directly involved with one of the cases.
Truth Games brings together courtroom photographs of accusers and defenders, positioned across from one another and divided by an image reflecting the crime, with all imagery and text drawn directly from newspaper accounts of the hearings. Phrases given in evidence are printed on perspex slats, piecing together accusation and defence. Faced with the terrible truths of apartheid brutality broadcast by the TRC hearings, many white South Africans said 'I did not know'. Truth Games allows viewers to engage directly with the work, sliding the slats over the images to reveal what is beneath.
In 2015, the student protests that swept through South Africa made it clear that many of apartheid’s wounds remain unhealed. For Williamson, a new consideration of the long-term effect of the violence of apartheid and the role of the TRC became necessary.
The dual channel video work It’s a pleasure to meet you (2016) brings two young people - Candice Mama and Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka - into dialogue for the first time whose fathers had been killed by the apartheid police. The title of the work references the greeting that Mama’s father's killer, apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock, gave each member of her family when they visited him in jail.
The screening of It’s a pleasure to meet you is alternated with the follow up video, That particular morning (2018), which was made in collaboration with Mgoduka. Here, Mgoduka is again a participant, and, on camera with his mother Doreen, he vocalises the questions about his dead father that he has held back for years. The work brings into focus the profound impact of this familial rupture and highlights differing generational attitudes towards the process of forgiveness initiated by the TRC hearings.
A Tale of Two Cradocks (1994) also focuses on a story of familial loss during apartheid. Seen from one angle, the work presents the tourist guidebook of the little town of Cradock. From the reverse angle, the story unfolds of Matthew Goniwe, a charismatic teacher and community leader who was targeted and killed by the apartheid government in 1985.
Testimony also features Williamson’s more recent series The Lost District (2016 -). Set against a wall drawing of the map of the old district, hand-engraved glass 'windows' and painted brass signage works derived from photographs recall the daily fabric of life in District Six. The delicate white lines of Williamson’s incised glass show up in the crisp grey shadows cast on the wall behind the work: the shapes of these buildings’ re-inscribed presence - like the accounts of the collaborators in Williamson’s films - offer renewed clarity to a history not so far removed from our present.
Artworks
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Artist Bio
Sue Williamson (b. 1941, Lichfield, UK) is one of South Africa’s most important contemporary artists. In the 1970s, Williamson started to make work which addressed social change and by the late 1980s she was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle titled, 'A Few South Africans' (1980s).
In 2025, a major retrospective of her five-decades long career, titled 'There’s something I must tell you,' will be shown at the Iziko South African National Gallery, following her UK and US institutional exhibitions in 2023 at The Box, Plymouth and The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
In 1997, Williamson founded www.artthrob.co.za, a leading website on South African contemporary art and the first of its kind in the country. Williamson has also authored two major publications - South African Art Now (2009) and Resistance Art in South Africa (1989).
Williamson has participated in biennales around the world, including the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2019); several Havana Biennales as well as Sydney, Istanbul, Venice and Johannesburg biennales.
Major international solo exhibitions include: 'Between Memory and Forgetting,' The Box, Plymouth, UK (2023); 'Other Voices, Other Cities,' Las Palmas (2023); 'Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget,' Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017); 'Other Voices, Other Cities,' SCAD Museum of Art, Georgia (2015), 'Messages from the Moat,' Den Haag, (2003) and 'The Last Supper Revisited,' National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. (2002).
Group exhibitions include: 'Tell Me What You Remember,' Barnes Foundation (2023); 'Breaking Down the Walls - 150 years of Collecting Art at Iziko,' Iziko South African Museum (2022); 'RESIST! The 1960s Protests, Photography and Visual Legacy,' BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (2018); 'Women House,' La Monnaie de Paris and National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington D.C) (2017, 2018); 'Being There,' Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2017); 'Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life,' International Centre for Photography in New York and the Museum Africa in Johannesburg (2014); 'The Short Century,' Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and P.S.1 New York (2001-2).
Collections include: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg. Williamson has authored two books - ‘South African Art Now’ (2009) and ‘Resistance Art in South Africa’ (1989).
Awards and fellowships include: The Living Legends Award (2020), attributed by the South African government’s Department of Sports, Arts and Culture; the University of Johannesburg’s Ellen Kuzwayo Award (2018); the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship (2011); the Smithsonian’s Visual Artist Research Award Fellowship (2007) and the Lucas Artists Residency Fellowship (2005) from Montalvo Art Center in California.
Williamson lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.
