Double Exposure: Lo Que Se Ve (What Can Be Seen)
Johannesburg - Exhibition. 24 July 14 to 24 August 14, Museum Africa.
Joburg's very first Argentinean Cultural Week is set to ignite the arts scene in late July, with a spotlight on two powerful solo photographic exhibitions at Museum Africa in Newtown, opening on 24 July.
The shows, Ausencias (Absences), by the internationally acclaimed Gustavo Germano, and Lo Que Se Ve (What Can Be Seen), a retrospective of works by the multi-award winning Adriana Lestido, run concurrently until late August, with Ausencias continuing until the end of September.
These will be the artists' first solo shows in South Africa and, significantly, both exhibitions resonate powerfully with each other and South African socio-political narratives.
Adriana Lestido's exhibition Lo Que Se Ve (What Can Be Seen), presents more than thirty years of the artist's work showing an introspective focus on human relationships, love and the difficulty of love, within an approach Lestido calls ‘subjective documentary', while Gustavo Germano's Ausencias (Absences) is a devastating, personal and melancholy series of works about people who went ‘missing' during the dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), under its systematic plan of illegal repression and forced disappearance of persons, with almost 500 clandestine detention centres.
It is a carefully considered selection of these works that will travel to South Africa for Lestido's show at Museum Africa. In an online interview with writer Josefina Licitra, Lestido says, "Somehow I connect from the emptiness. And from there I see. But the seeing is not an intellectual process. It is more unconscious. I do not photograph what I see, because if I have already seen it … why would I want to see it in on paper? In fact, what I want to see is what my eye hasn't seen. What I perceived but didn't quite see." True to this, writer Marcos Zimmerman says of the exhibition: " … what you see in Lestido's photographs is nothing more nor less than what we all intuit but cannot explain. Images that reveal the real world - but also a photographer obsessed to show, by pure instinct, what is behind people …"
Special events open to the public:
Fri. 25 July. 11h00. Talk by Adriana Lestido – What Can Be Seen: A life in photography
Sat. 26 July. 11h00: Talk by Gustavo Germano – The use of photographs of the disappeared in the search for visibility for the victims.
Both talks take place in the Auditorium, Museum Africa. Gallery open Tuesday to Sunday 09h00 – 17h00