The Past Lies Ahead, Sue Williamson’s new exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape Town, coincides with the launch of a superbly illustrated 256 page monograph, Sue Williamson: Life and Work covering the artist’s entire career, published by the prestigious Italian art house, Skira.
The exhibition looks back at themes that have consistently appeared throughout the artists’ career, such as absence and loss, and their continued importance in the present. An intervention in the space of the gallery, for instance, allows visitors to gaze through a window, especially uncovered for this exhibition, which overlooks the area that was once District Six. On a new window, installed over the old one, Williamson has engraved the scene as it exists today, but has also included the streets and the dense rows of cottages that would have been there in 1960.
Similarly The Lost District, five other works based on old photographs and engraved on sheets of glass, will also memorialize what is no longer there.
In other works, Williamson presents a new piece from her series Other Voices Other Cities. Since 2009, the series explores the definition of place to cities and citizens. In each new city, she works by setting up a workshop of young artists and other residents, asking them to discuss what distinguishes their city and the people of that city from one another. At the conclusion of the workshop participants meet again and hold up letters of the alphabet to spell out the message for a word-by-word series of photographs. At a time when much of the world is in constant flux, the dialogue created by residents of different cities is engaging and revealing. Williamson’s newest addition to the series is the city of Paris, shot in mid-January.
The show also features preparatory mixed media works for a larger video installation that investigates another key theme in the artists’ oeuvre, the long-term effects of the violence of apartheid on those who experienced it at the time, and also on the new generation.
Willamson has been described by Robert Storr, former director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York as ‘one of the foremost artists of her generation’, and her early series _A Few South Africans_, acquired by the Tate Modern, London last year, is currently on display on _Citizens and State_.
The opening of the exhibition on February 4 will launch the artist’s monograph, edited by acclaimed writer Mark Gevisser, and with contributions from Chika Okeke-Ogulu, Pumla Gobodo Madikizela and Ciraj Rassool.
Artworks
Create a Goodman Gallery account to view pricing of available artworks and access purchasing.
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.
