Oppressive reflections

MECA's brooding new show

by Jenna Russell

"LITANY":a series of South African passbooks transferred to rich, gorgeous papers.

Visit "Translation/Seduction/Displacement," the fall show at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art, on a day you're not feeling tired/stupid/discouraged. This is a challenging collection of photography and post-conceptual work by South African artists, one well worth seeing, and thought and effort are required for a productive encounter. Be patient; you're sure to have a thoughtful day before the end of October.

Race and apartheid are of central importance to this work, as one would expect, but sex, the media, religion, and language are also covered. Some artists strive to make connections, placing South Africa's violent past in a global context. Every artist grapples with recent history, processing the past and the present in individual ways. The results are rarely beautiful; more often they're strange, resistant, and opaque.

Photography is widely used, for reasons that aren't hard to fathom. It's the documentary medium, the truth-teller's tool, and it's a natural choice for artists whose role, in part, is to do away with lies. It's also the stand-by of the modern storyteller, used by journalists to transmit news to the world. Of course, the photographer chooses what image to send, and there's a sense in this show of the native artists seizing the camera lens from outsiders.

Looking at Santu Mofokeng's series of black-and-white landscape photos, "Nightfall of the Spirit," one has no clear idea where each picture was taken. There are no handy labels to give assistance. We see graves, fences, guns, tunnels, burnt walls, railroad tracks, trains. There's a wall of human skulls, the tangible and textured residue of suffering, and dignified trees that persevere in silence. The show catalogue tells us the scenes come from Germany, Poland, France, and Vietnam, as well as South Africa.

Mofokeng's catalog essay sheds light on his aims. Apartheid's demise poses a challenge for South Africans, he writes -- how to deal with its memory. Recording landscapes of atrocity elsewhere in the world, Mofokeng seeks the wisdom of the ages. "Would a monument invite remembrance or, through a kind of containment, forgetting?" he asks. "How does nature deal with the memory of wounds in the landscape?"

The memory of wounds is fresh in the photolithographic prints of Rudzani Nemasetoni, and there is no forgetting, but there is stunning dignity and even beauty salvaged from the wreckage. Nemasetoni's "Litany" is a series of family portraits; the photographs are from his South African relatives' government passbooks. A kind of paper handcuffs, needed by blacks to move around their own country, the documents are painful artifacts. But in the artist's hands, they are transformed into something else, transferred to rich, gorgeous papers and blown up with all their rips and folds and fingerprints, the unique details that mirror the uniqueness of each person forced to carry them.

Nemasetoni's "Sketch" is equally affecting. These prints show identification charts once used by police in South Africa, with multiple-choice diagrams of different lips, noses, and chins. The drawings are crude and ridiculous, almost funny in their lack of realistic representation. The horror is that the cartoons played a part in real-life law enforcement, with nose shape a likely predictor of outcome.

Alongside the photographs -- the "real," in which nothing can hide -- are two major pieces that derive their power from the act of concealing. "Screen," by Siemon Allen, is the subtle centerpiece of the show, but it could be mistaken for an ill-conceived partition, part of the gallery layout. A large, four-sided box standing six feet tall, "Screen" appears black, but acts as a mirror on closer approach. In fact, the walls are made of woven VHS tape. It's a complex statement about the twin archives of memory and technology, and their limits -- the structure, built of the material that stores all modern history, is dark and silent, sharing nothing. Is there something going on inside the box? We can't see.

Nor can we see the art at the heart of Hentie van der Merwe's untitled installation. Set up in one corner of the main gallery, the piece consists of a small cell with a barred door, its interior seemingly empty but for a mirror on the wall. It reflects a grid of photographs of nude Namibian soldiers. We can strain against the door, but we can't glimpse the originals. It's frustrating and exhausting, and soon we surrender doubt and accept the reflection -- just the way we accept half-truths, perhaps, from governments, or television.

An ominous mood is produced by the soundtrack to another piece, "Con.text." A computerized voice, unrecognizable as human, shouts the marching orders "links, regs" (left, right). It translates as heavy repetition, embodying all the frightening aspects of military motion. The sound accompanies an ever-changing pair of slides projected on the wall, pictures of a row of black Bibles in different South African languages. When the English Bible disappears from the end of the row, the only white volume -- the Afrikaans book -- seems to vanish against the white background.

Like many of the works in the show, it's the kind of piece that has a certain ambiguous impact even without explanation, but is immeasurably stronger when its meaning is laid out. The catalog should be required reading for all visitors to this show.

The most evocative piece hangs in the middle of the corridor, forcing visitors to move around it. The installation by Senzeni Marasela has no title. It's a series of floating silver tea trays, each hanging from the ceiling on nearly invisible wires, each implying the presence of a ghostly, invisible servant. The trays are covered with yellowed, lace-edged cloths printed with a photographer's images of the Soweto uprisings.

ICA Director Mark Bessire helps explain Marasela's meaning: racism is something passed down through generations, like an antique tray. Embroidery on one of the cloths spells out the dangerous, contagious thinking: "Kaffirs Yes I Know Them They Are All the Same." Under the suspended trays, dark shadows swing on the gallery floor. If this important, disturbing show is any indication, it's the shadows -- in their memories, in their hearts -- that will occupy these artists for a long time to come.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.