Sue

Williamson:

Iziko

South

African

National

Gallery

In the courtyard of the Iziko South African National Gallery hangs Messages from the Moat, 1997, an artwork featuring fourteen hundred glass bottles, some suspended in a fishing net and dripping with water, others in the pit below. Each bottle is inscribed with the name, place of birth, and sale price of an enslaved person brought to Cape Town between 1658 and 1700. This weeping installation serves as an entry point to “There’s Something I Must Tell You,” Sue Williamson’s first retrospective exhibition.

Williamson’s work, moving among printmaking, photography, video, drawing, and installation, engages the shifting social and political landscape. From precolonial times through the apartheid era—when Williamson, who was born in England in 1941, began practicing, first as a journalist and then as an artist—to the early and later years of South Africa’s democracy, the exhibition reads like a timeline of the country’s local histories of dispossession. It comes at a time when dialogues around freedom have gotten both more complex and frustratingly hollowed out. Themes of memory, remembrance, recurrence, and repetition course through Williamson’s work, with some series adopting an activist modality.