Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Re-presenting Time

The image of time. The time of imagination. Time is subjective unless it is articulated or defined by us. Time is also formed around a repetition of moments that are fixed in physical or emotional space. Philosophically, time is a repetition of moments that is implanted in our consciousness, where our imagination and memory process it as an experience that we and others can engage with. Re-presenting time is an arrogance that creativity assumes in all its various forms, and as such is a cherished human patrimony that establishes the function and understanding amongst cultures. As a political act, time can be erased to re-represent history in order to facilitate or emphasize power. An example of this is the destruction of the Buddha sculpture by the Taliban during the Afghanistan war or the passive attitude of the American military in preventing the destruction of the Baghdad library and museum or the plundering of African cultural history during the Colonial era that now forms part of an ethnographic reconstruction of meaning that reaffirms the dominance of Colonial thought. The recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa reminds us of the importance of traumatic disclosure as a mechanism for making visible an under-disclosed past in order that a new future may be individually and collectively imagined. Subjecting a nation, people or an individual to a type of imposed amnesia as a result of political and/or economic manipulation alerts us to the importance of how we position ourselves within historical and contemporary time. It is fundamental within this context to analyze how the manipulation of time erodes our notion of memory and how this memory can be a powerful agent in the recovery of lost identities and human dignity. In Angola the concept of time has been historically defined and influenced. Historical time defines the psyche of a people, subjected until recently to a devastating civil war with material and emotional consequences. Individuals are arguably never alone if they are considered as integral to a social structure. Locating the individual in a social or collective totality defines the African notion of Ubuntu. Deconstructing, isolating and traumatizing the collective sense of the individual fragments the memory which collectively integrates us into the political and social construct. Accentuating the trauma of 30 years of social unrest (war), the Brazilian soap operas, for example, created a cult of the individual, thus further fragmented any form of traditional collective engagement. Angolan civil society recognizes this and has begun implementing a social methodology that invests in creativity or individual artistic expression that promotes the idea of social cohesion. Video art is not yet fully understood or even embraced by African artists who are traditionally deprived of the basic information and global discourses around this discipline. Angolan artists living in the Diaspora, together with filmmakers, have begun experimenting with a new visual language that will bare fruits in the future. In Mozambique video has gained significant impetus after the show with curatorship by South African artist Jose Ferreira, now based in London. This show was the first major video event ever in Mozambique and has resulted in a new generation of artists experimenting with this art form despite the obvious technological limitations and market resistance. The practice of video art has increasingly engaged a specific sociopolitical critique. Audiences are not traditionally passive as they tend to be when confronting cinema. They are developing a critical attitude that engages the art work as a deconstruction of the cultural text. It is accepted that audiences are not anonymous constituencies readily categorized but consist of individuals who increasingly participate in constructing meaning and social structure. Post-Apartheid South Africa is best illustrated by endemic class divisions that collide within an imposed technological arena which defines a very specific idea of a relentless imposed modernity. It is quite possible to engage or experience these cultural collisions in public space by, for example, witnessing a traditional Sangoma processing Credit at an Automatic Teller Machine. These hybridisms offer us interesting substance to deconstruct the normal intellectual clichés which define contemporary African societal transitions. South African artists have managed to position themselves in the contemporary international creative discourse because they seem to have recognized the ability of the creative image to critique a collapsing social system (Apartheid). Despite the doors of major Western art institutions and art schools being increasingly accessible, they remain closed for the majority in Africa. These critical divides have resulted in a social visual language that is evolving parallel to the prevailing international critique — which ironically does not represent or reflect the audiences which they purport to represent. Numerous cultural strategies are being designed to engage the issue of language and power in a search that legitimizes the “authentic” and encourages a critique around the representation of memory. The co-option of selected “others” from the periphery into a dominant creative narrative serves to fulfill the symbolic gesture of cultural assimilation or inclusion. This selected inclusion suggests that the marginalized narrative is being critically engaged as part of a new expanded sensibility of cultural inclusion. It is important that we acknowledge the futility of re-packaging the unfamiliar for consumption and endorsement by the dominant narrative. This critical detachment is dangerous: it will render the “other” increasingly remote and intractable, and fail to grasp the formal and conceptual merits of cultural plurality as a critical foil to the idea of homogenization, inherent within the idea of a universally recognized and adopted cultural zone of economic and cultural activity. A group of artists have been selected to interrogate issues of memory, cultural hybridism and the historical representation of time. They have been asked to formulate a language that evolves from an inner need to exteriorize/exorcize time and memory. The artists chosen are Andries Botha (sculptor and video artist), Greg Streak (video artist, sculptor and theoretician), Jay Pather (performance and video artist), Moschekwa Langa (painter and video artist), Steven Hobbs (video and graphic artist), Jose Ferreira (video artist), Angela Ferreira (multimedia artist), Berry Bickle (multimedia artist), Virginia Mackenny (painter and video artist) and Minnette Vári (video artist). If we are to acknowledge that art lives only in the next second frame of time, then we must think of creativity in the context of new contemporary. “Re-presenting time” is a curatorial gesture to recognize culture as a social catalyst and emphasize the South-South creative discourse as an element of contemporary cultural discourse.

* Edited by Andries Botha

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "Displacements - 14th International Eletronic Art Festival": 22nd September to 19th October 2003, pp. 255-257, São Paulo, Brazil, 2003.