Vanley Burke, Photographer and Anthropologist. |
FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg,
Bunting Road Campus
24 July-15 August 2014
Final opportunity to participate in the VIAD Public Programme.
FRIDAY
1 AUGUST: 2-3pm
PUBLIC WALKABOUT
Vanley Burke presents a
walkabout of his photographs on exhibition. Follow Link to Where I live Birmingham.
Vanley Burke Retrospective Exhibition, By the Rivers of Birmnam. |
Lynda Morris, Curator of the Vanley Burke Retrospective Exhibition, By The Rivers of Birminam. |
PANEL
DISCUSSION 4
NEED AND IMPULSE: THE COMPLEX
IMPETUS TO ‘CAPTURE’ AND ‘SHOOT’
South Africa’s photographic history is heavily
weighted towards documentary photography, which has strongly represented – as
both historical record and activist undertaking – the socio-political evolution
of the country. Contemporary photography in South Africa remains steeped in
this documentary tradition, with a younger generation of photographers
continuing to engage and further that legacy – some as activists; others seeking
to capture the zeitgeist of their particular social domain or
socio-economic-political era, producing photographs that articulate the
specificities of their space and place.
Shona Hunter, Vanley Burke and Nontobeko Ntombela. |
LAST WEEK's VIAD Programme.
THURSDAY
31 JULY: 6-8pm
FILM
SCREENING
HANDSWORTH
SONGS (1986)
BLACK AUDIO FILM COLLECTIVE
The
Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) was founded in 1982 by Portsmouth
Polytechnic Sociology, Fine Art and Psychology students, John Akomfrah, Lina
Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Reece Auguiste, Trevor Mathison, Edward George, Claire
Johnson, and later, David Lawson. The group emerged at a time of racial
repositioning of black presence in British public life, and went on to produce
some of the most challenging and experimental documentaries in Britain in the
1980s. Their work has been critically acclaimed for its commitment to black
political history and its experimental formats.
The BAFC
essay-films, exploring themes of diaspora, memory and political struggle, are
characterised by a formal preoccupation with a poetics of the archive. In their
practice, the sound, image and temporality of the archive are reworked into an
associative montage of meaning, memory and mood. Depleted of their authority, the
newsreel, news report and television documentary become the raw material for a
fiction based on the intimacy of personal reflection.
In
Handsworth Songs, the BAFC's representation of black history is refracted
through the Birmingham riots of 1 September 1985, and other civil disturbances
of the 1980s. The film remains significant, in that it engages with the means
by which the practices and ideologies of mainstream media can marginalise an
ethnic group. According to John Akomfrah (2002:553), the leitmotif underpinning
Handsworth Songs is that the Birmingham riots of September 1985 were "the
outcome of a violent and protracted suppression of Black presence and Black
desire across the broad landscape of British life". Handsworth Songs
provides vivid and powerful insights into the spatial and temporal context that
Burke was actively photographing throughout that era.
WEDNESDAY
30 JULY: 5.30-7pm
PANEL
DISCUSSION 3
REPOSITIONING THE ARCHIVE
This panel considers the multiple possibilities of
collating, curating and reading archives to create space and presence for
multiple metanarratives that have the potential to question, challenge,
interfere with, expose, subvert or counter the ideologies and power structures
underpinning 'official' histories or accepted perspectives. Archives, being
accumulations of historical records – whether photographic, textual, sonic, or
object-based – may span the intimate and personal to the documentary, yet,
through their curation and reading, have the means to speak to, and of, a
broader collective consciousness or historical moment from particular
positionalities and perspectives.
TUESDAY
29 JULY: 6-7.30pm
CONVERSATION
BETWEEN VANLEY BURKE AND VRON WARE
CRITICAL RECORDINGS:
PHOTOGRAPHING BLACK BRITAIN
The late
1950s to 1980s marked a time during which substantial shifts were taking place
in Britain in the theorisation of culture, race, gender and class, and their
implications for human rights. During these decades, Birmingham – the most
populous British city outside London and home to one of the largest
concentrations of African-Caribbean immigrants in Britain – was a pivotal
centre of theoretical development and political activism.
Dynamic discursive
spaces for theoretical engagement and critique emerged, such as development of
the post-war British social and political movement known as the New Left in the
1950s; Stuart Hall’s influential journal, New Left Review, which he founded in
1960; the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of
Birmingham (founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart, as its first director, followed
by Stuart Hall from 1968 until 1979, and later Richard Johnson); the CCCS's
development of the then-new field of Cultural Studies (later to become known as
British Cultural Studies); the CCCS's pioneering of distinctive
interdisciplinary approaches to the study of class, culture, and communication
that drew powerful critical energy from the social and political insurgency of
the late 1960s; the CCCS's contribution to the vibrant intellectual explorations
of immigrant, diasporic and ethnic minority histories and identities from the
late 1960s onwards; writings on the construction of cultural identity, race,
ethnicity, and the politics of black diasporic identities by theorists
associated with the CCCS, such as Hall and Gilroy; as well as strong, vocal
demonstrations by black diasporic communities fighting for cultural and
political recognition, equality and an end to racial oppression.
Vanley Burke. |
Vron Ware
(currently a Research Fellow in the Centre for Socio-Cultural Change (CReSC)
and the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) at the Open
University), is predominantly known as a writer and scholar-activist whose
writings on issues around gender, citizenship, belonging and national identity
have been key to pioneering the study of race and culture in contemporary
Britain. She established an international reputation for her research on
anti-racism and feminism with the publication of her book, Beyond the pale:
white women, racism and history (1992, Verso). Her focus on the discursive
production of whiteness through a gendered reading of colonial history was
instrumental in shaping a new international field of study that has since
become known as Critical Whiteness Studies.
In 2008,
Ware turned her attention to an examination of Britishness and militarisation,
using the recruitment and employment of ex-Commonwealth soldiers into the
British army from 1998 onwards as an entry point. In her most recent book,
Military migrants: fighting for YOUR country (2012, Palgrave Macmillan), she
explores the phenomenon of Britain's multi-national army, posing probing
questions around racism, citizenship, immigration, national identity, and
cultural diversity in relation to the armed services.
Although
best known as a writer, Ware has also produced an important and little known
body of documentary photography. The photographs, documenting protests,
anti-fascist movements and cultural resistance in the United Kingdom (UK) were
taken during the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which time she was actively
involved in feminist and anti-racist movements and worked as editor of the
anti-fascist Birmingham-based magazine, Searchlight (1981-1983). She is
currently working with the Autograph ABP Archive & Research Centre, London
to digitally preserve her extensive photographic archive.
In a
conversation between these two highly regarded cultural critics and documentary
photographers whose photographic projects in Birmingham would have coincided,
they consider the driving impetus, as well as the political necessity for
producing their images. Both bodies of work represent invaluable archives
documenting an era of radical social shifts and active forms of resistance.
Vanley Burke at the FADA Gallery. |
MONDAY
28 JULY: 6-8pm
PANEL
DISCUSSION 2
VOICE: AGENCY, RELATIONALITY,
SUBJECTIVITY, DIFFERENCE
This panel
raises additional questions pertaining to documentary photography specifically,
and to the act of photographing more broadly, including, for example, ways in
which documentary photography may highlight ideological positions of difference
(class, race, economic, cultural, social); whether representation of personal
detail necessarily asserts an individualised subjectivity, or whether it might
instead result in subjects being classified in collective terms (as opposed to
being read as individuals within their own time, context, life- experience and
self-definition); in what ways vernacular photography, documentary photography
and photographs produced as forms of cultural activism differ, if they do;
whether photographic conventions for documentary and art photography carry
different licenses in terms of what they are able to portray, and how they do
so, or whether it becomes a matter of the context in which the image is
exhibited, and/or the way in which the photographer’s or commentator's
explication of the work is framed; whether, while purporting to reflect aspects
of ‘reality’, documentary photographs also feed into aspects of the imaginary?
And if so, whether documentary images run the risk of contributing to, and
reinforcing, imagined constructs such as group stereotypes.
Vanley Burke, Nontobeko Ntombela, Leora Faber. |
SUNDAY
27 JULY: 3-5pm
PANEL
DISCUSSION 1
POSITIONS OF ENUNCIATION:
PRESENTING, READING AND RECEIVING BY THE
RIVERS OF BIRMINAMWe all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context’, positioned (Hall 1993:223).
Shona Hunter. |
The processes of looking at, speaking about,
presenting, reading and receiving photographic images involve a complex
interplay of power relations between photographer, those photographed, viewers,
curators, critics and writers. These power relations are largely contingent on
the subject's positionality.
Nontobeko Ntombela |
Participants on this panel foreground their
particular interests and investments that come into play with regard to their
involvement with, and/or relationship to, Vanley Burke’s exhibition and its
accompanying Public Programme, and, more broadly, question how their
positionalities, as they are enacted in these contexts, both complicate and
enrich this collaborative work. Discussions are framed as part of a broader
conversation and engagement with the audience about what brings each of the
participants to do identity work via the visual, what that means for each
person, and how each participant’s particular positioning relates to broader
issues of power and/or inequality in (neo)colonial and postcolonial contexts.
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