Sue

Williamson

and

Lebohang

Kganye

at

The

Barnes

Foundation

by

Athi

Mongezeleli

Joja

At the Barnes Foundation, “Sue Williamson & Lebohang Kganye: Tell Me What You Remember” was a two-woman show organized by Emma Lewis, a curator at Turner Contemporary in Margate, England. The exhibition featured photographs, videos, and mixed-media installations that revisit the artists’ memories of growing up in South Africa, where they both continue to live and work (Williamson in Cape Town, Kganye in Johannesburg). In the postapartheid era, memory remains a contentious and political zone, one that continues to divide South Africans between those who seek to fortify the dominant narrative of a liberated polity and those who challenge the veracity of this claim.

Since the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement&#—a student-led revolt aimed at taking down a statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, which led to a push in decolonizing the sociopolitical and educational systems across all of South Africa&#—the dubious claim that democracy delivered “freedom for all” has become even more specious. “Tell Me What You Remember” partly presupposed, and even undermined, this bifurcation in memory through its title. But how do we recall and remain attentive to a past that refuses to stay there?