Sue Williamson has been a key figure on the South African art scene since the early 1980s when she produced A Few South Africans, a groundbreaking series of portrait prints featuring women in the struggle against apartheid.
Voices, is Williamson’s first solo exhibition in Cape Town in a number of years. Important selected work from the past three decades will be shown alongside her latest two series – Other Voices, Other Cities, an international series of projects documented in photographs, and The Diaries of Lady Anne B. Also on view will be Last Supper at Manley Villa, a portfolio of black and white photographs taken in the home of one family in the final days of District Six in 1981.
Williamson’s work has always been about addressing social issues and mediating contemporary history through the people who are living through it. After the end of apartheid she addressed the stories that came to light during the hearings at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and subsequently addressed the HIV/AIDS pandemic in a moving series entitled From the Inside.
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Extending her attention beyond South Africa, Williamson’s Other Voices, Other Cities examines what it means, in this age of globalization, to live in a particular place. Why do the residents of a city choose to live there, and if there were one message that would express the essence of that city, what would it be?
Williamson approaches the project by gathering together a group of young artists and others and asking them to workshop this question. At the end of the workshop the participants vote on the most popular statement. This statement is then made up in large cardboard letters, and the participants pose in the city, holding up the letters to spell out their message. On almost every occasion, there have been difficulties with local authorities in getting the photographs taken.
Installation Images
At a time when so much of the world is grappling with accelerated globalization, the dialogue created by the residents of the different cities is engaging and revealing. The cities featured in the series so far are Havana, Harare, Johannesburg, London, Bern and Berlin. Other cities like Beirut, Beijing and New York are in the planning.
Last year, Williamson undertook a large-scale commission at Cape Town International Airport on a 30-metre glass wall, producing a work entitled A Random History of Cape Town, 1499 – 1994. Research for this project led her to the diaries of Lady Anne Barnard, wife of the British Colonial Secretary of the Cape Colony. From 1797 to 1800 Lady Anne wrote freely and openly of daily life in Cape Town, bearing witness to the treatment of the ‘Hottentots’, the intrigues, the babies of suspicious parentage, the fears of a slave revolt, the floggings, the fleas, the food … the complex picture she paints of early colonialism throws light on later history.
In The Diaries of Lady Anne B, Williamson draws on Lady Anne’s writings and sketches to present a series of monotypes. With this work, Williamson, who trained as a printmaker, returns to the mark of the hand.
Williamson’s work forms part of almost every museum collection in South Africa and is also included in many international art institutions and private collections. She was recently honoured with the Rockefeller Foundation Creative Arts Fellowship for 2011, and will take up her three-month residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy.
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.
