Asserting

Presence:

Land

and

Colonial

Histories

in

Goodman

Gallery’s

‘Frameworks’

A dual exhibition, with selected works from David Goldblatt and Kiluanji Kia Henda, Goodman Gallery’s ‘Frameworks’ interrogates land and settlement in Southern Africa. The exhibition engages the viewer in a dialogue between the work of Goldblatt and Kia Henda in the context of historical land dispossession and land insecurity — Kia Henda’s approach is speculative, and Goldblatt’s decidedly documentarian.

Goldblatt’s photographs depict the fragility of human settlement, as well as the violence of the colonial project. In Mother and child in their home after the destruction of its shelter by officials (1984), the devastation caused by the Group Areas Act of 1950 is made clear. A woman and her child recline on a mattress in the ruins of their home, their possessions at the mercy of the elements, unprotected by the shelter that once existed there. The photograph documents the precarity of Black life during Apartheid and serves as a chilling premonition. Thirty years after independence, the legacy of Apartheid lives on in cities like Johannesburg, where Goldblatt grew up.