School of Art Gallery

Tropic

15 August - 2 September 2005

Jeremy Wafer

Bionote

Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

A shared project between the School of Art RMIT, The City of Melbourne and the South Project.

Jeremy Wafer works in sculpture, photography, video and drawing and has been interested in exploring a space between indigenous material culture and modernity, mapping South Africa’s social, cultural and political geography. His work is directed toward art in its relation to the public sphere and to the politics and poetics of landscape.

More recent work has been focused on issues of land and territory and on a more conceptual reflection on processes and forms of representation. This investigation has used aerial and micro photography, numeric and colour coding, site specific intervention and mapping as characteristic modes.

‘In my most recent work done as part of Tangencya (a site specific project involving artists from South Africa and a number of other African countries) I worked in the Cato Manor area outside Durban. The site has a strong history of conflict and dispossession involving the original Indian occupants, a later influx of displaced rural Africans, racial riots followed by so called slum clearance in the 1950 and 1960’s, a long period of abandonment and is now marked by large scale social housing developments. My intervention attempted to find some way of linking the social and ritual practices still maintained in the remaining Hindu temples with ideas of dispersal, dislocation and relocation and took the form of a site specific performance using small clay lamps on a section of road which had been built through the middle of a small temple precinct and a subsequent installation using photographs of the burnt out lamps attached to buildings and trees along the road running through the area. The work referenced (somewhat obliquely) the phenomenon of road side shrines which are characteristic of both Hindu and traditional Zulu ritual practice as well as issues of the mapping and marking of territory.’

As part of the residency Jeremy explored issues common to the histories of South Africa and Australia - the generally violent or duplicitous occupation of land, dispossession and dislocation, on a physical level and spiritual or psychic level.

Images

Catalogue

Bionote