Author Description

"Taking their cue from Okwui Enwezor's title for the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, All the world's futures, Rose and Till present an array of works by artists who are deeply invested in local iterations of power, freedom, and civil liberty. The curators wish not only to represent recent, important work from South Africa, but also to set in motion a complex and dynamic debate about the relationship between the contemporary moment and the narratives of the past. With this in mind, they have sought ways of inserting new works into a series of historic moments without, in any way, making those moments explicit or suggesting a crass opposition to or identification with history. Rather, they see--and seek to represent--the past as an alluvial undertow in South Africa's fractured and multivocal present, a stream of dreams, desires, and memories that frequently boil to the surface in ways both useful and destructive. The contemporary works on the exhibition pose a series of counter moves. Some are little interested in history and focus instead on ruptures in the present. Some embed themselves in regurgitated narratives of liberation and national identity with the view to unsettling the certainties of these narratives. Some, through their representation of the fraught particularities and singularities of individual lives, interrogate the grand myths of democracy and nation building. Some are subtle meditations on loss or escape or hope; others, strident refusals of the normative. Given the strength of the works to be presented, the curators face the challenge of saying too much or offering too confused an experience of the works and their disparate imperatives. They thus bring to bear on the conceptualising of this exhibition, their combined experience--from work in the public sector, the management of museums and biennales, curatorship, architecture, gallery and museum design--of locating and communicating a strong but multilayered curatorial