Nelson Mandela University (NMU) photography lecturer Heidi Saayman Hattingh has a new exhibition that will open at the Bird Street Gallery on Tuesday under the banner of the visual arts department of the university’s School of Music, Art and Design.
It is titled Site: Engaging the archive and will be opened by NMU’s Prof Mary Duker at 20 Bird Street at 6 for 6.30pm.
Saayman Hattingh is an associate professor in the visual arts department and has been conducting research intosocial documentary photography for nearly two decades. Her current interest is in SA visual identity, particularly iconic imagery, visual communication and cultural identity, and she is working towards a practice-based PhD at Stellenbosch University.
“Site functions as a space of otherness and difference; a liminal space – ambiguous and ambivalent, moving between public and private as well as between commerce and culture,” Saayman Hattingh said.
“The exhibition challenges perceptions of colonial English identity as private photographic narratives resist and/or endorse the popular image of women perpetuated by advertising in SA English-language women’s magazines during the late 1920s and early 1930s.”
Site, she says, brings together private narrative – family albums – and public historical narrative – in the form of popular media.
Saayman Hattingh used an album of her great aunt Mollie Smith, a white, middle-class South African of Scottish descent, as well as archived magazine articles and adverts to curate and reposition images from the 1920s and 30s, presenting an alternative reading experience to the viewer. The exhibition runs until December 12, weekdays from 9am to 3pm.
Inquiries: Jonathan van der Walt on 041-504-3293 or e-mail: gallery@mandela.ac.za