Haus der Kunst presents Rise and Fall of Apartheid. Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life on view February 15–May 26, 2013.
Eli Weinberg, Crowd Near the Drill Hall on the Opening Day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956. Times Media Collection, Courtesy Museum Africa, Johannesburg.
Haus der Kunst is pleased to announce Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, a historical exhibition that presents one of the most comprehensive explorations of the legacy and impact of apartheid on the political, social, and cultural life of South Africa. Curated by Okwui Enwezor with Rory Bester, and organized by the International Center of Photography, New York, this critically acclaimed and award-winning exhibition explores the role played by photography and art in recording, documenting, and elucidating the dramatic events that shaped the struggle against apartheid.
Complex, vivid, and evocative, and covering more than fifty years of this pivotal period in South Africa, these visual records reveal the procedures and processes of the apartheid state from its beginning in 1948 to the first non-racial democratic elections in 1994. Featuring more than 600 documentary photographs, artworks, films, newsreel footage, books, magazines, and assorted archival documents, the exhibition will fill more than 2,000 square meters of the East Wing of Haus der Kunst, offering an absorbing exploration of one of the twentieth century’s most contentious historical eras.
Rise and Fall of Apartheid highlights the different strategies adopted by photographers and artists; from social documentary to reportage, photo essays to artistic appropriation of press and archival material. Through these polysemic images, the exhibition embarks on a tour of how photographers and artists think with pictures, the questions their images pose, and the issues of social justice, resistance, civil rights and the actions of opposition to apartheid they raise. In so doing, Rise and Fall of Apartheid brings together numerous iconic photographs that have rarely been shown before, to propose a fresh historical overview of the photographic and artistic responses to apartheid.
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