Goodman Gallery is pleased to present, That particular morning, Sue Williamson’s first solo exhibition in Johannesburg since since her prestigious survey show Can’t Remember, Can’t Forget at the Apartheid Museum in 2017.
That particular morning brings together two dual-channel videos from No more fairy tales, a series of filmed conversations, which highlight the reality of daily life in South Africa twenty years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
The TRC was setup in 1996 by the South African government with the aim of initiating a healing process within its grief-stricken society. Taking the form of a series of hearings, the commission’s mandate was to bear witness to, record, and in some cases grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes relating to human rights violations, while offering victims the chance to share their stories. In 2015, as student unrest swept across the country, it became apparent that many of apartheid’s wounds remained unhealed.
These events have subsequently sparked fierce debate in South Africa regarding the state of our society. That particular morning, Williamson’s most recent film in her No more fairy tales series, is in collaboration with Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka. Mgoduka is the son of policeman Mbambalala Glen Mgoduka, who was killed in December 1989 by a car bomb planted by the apartheid state. In this film, Mgoduka asks his mother Doreen questions he has carried for many years, bringing to light issues of forgiveness, loneliness, respect, and the differing attitudes of two generations toward the processes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.
Mgoduka also appears in one of the first films from the series, It’s a pleasure to meet you. In this film, Mgoduka appears in conversation with Candice Mama, whose father was killed by apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock. The pair, who are both in their twenties, discuss their lives, what it has meant not to have a father, how it has affected their mothers and their family life, as well as delving further into the failures of the TRC’s process of forgiveness. The title of the film refers to the greeting apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock gave each member of the Mama family when they visited him in jail.
Postcards from Africa is a series of new ink drawings based on postcards from the early 1900s, produced for residents and travelers in Africa as well as for collectors who had never set foot on the continent. These postcards, which peaked in popularity at that time, now contribute to understanding political and cultural changes in Africa as the rise of the new medium coincided with the expansion and consolidation of colonial rule. In Williamson’s re-drawn scenes from these postcards, all the figures have been left out: a reference to the scourge of slavery, which saw 12.5 million people shipped from the continent to the Americas.
Artworks
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Signs of the Lost District is a new series of signage works derived from old photographs which recall the cinemas, the fish market, the public wash house and the cafes which once were part of the daily fabric of District Six. These works are made in laser cut metal and either powder coated or hand painted. The Lost District offers a similar archive-based, historical perspective in the form of eight works based on old photographs of District Six engraved on sheets of glass and perspex. Three of the panels were created for Williamson’s last solo exhibition in Cape Town This Past Lies Ahead, in which the artist installed the works in the gallery overlooking the area where the old buildings, churches, mosques and schools, along with hundreds of cottages and terrace houses stood before being demolished by the apartheid state.
In addition, five new panels from this series have been created for this exhibition.
The delicate lines of Williamson’s incised glass in these works are difficult to see, but show up clearly in the crisp gray shadows cast on the wall behind the work: the shapes of these buildings’ reinscribed presence—like the accounts of the collaborators in Williamson’s films —offering renewed clarity to a history not so far removed from our present.
* The series has been commissioned by research professor Dr Pumla Gobodo Madikizela, as a component of a larger project funded by the Mellon Foundation entitled ‘Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past: transforming scholarship in the humanities and the arts'.
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.
