Journal Articles (Peer-Reviewed) by Yvette Greslé
Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2017
The reviewer pays close attention to the conceptual strategies present in a new body of work by P... more The reviewer pays close attention to the conceptual strategies present in a new body of work by Phoebe Boswell. Produced for a solo exhibition in 2017 at Tiwani Contemporary, London, the work builds on the artist’s exploration of drawing, animation, and technology. The exhibition title, Phoebe Boswell: For Every Real Word Spoken, is taken from Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1977). The exhibition is composed of a series of eight drawings of eight female figures, an animation, and ephemeral drawings and texts on the gallery walls. Each sitter, who is unclothed and meets the viewer’s gaze in a feminist gesture, holds a mobile phone inscribed with a barcode. Viewers can scan the barcodes from their smartphones via a QR scanner in order to access a digital space. The reviewer stages a subjective and experiential encounter with the work as she focuses on spatial dynamics and the ethics and politics of audience participation. The work expands political and ethical questions about woman as “sign” and the tensions that exist within the idea of woman as a collective “we.” The reviewer foregrounds the dense intertextuality of Boswell’s practice, which brings histories and experiences across temporal and geographical sites into a relation. The reviewer draws from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017) as she engages the work as a site of feminist memory. She positions Ahmed’s performative, autobiographical, political, and theoretical encounter with bodies that are not accommodated by normative social, political, and institutional spaces in dialogue with Boswell’s work.
In this review, as a viewer who is also South African, I engage the tension between the ‘tyranny ... more In this review, as a viewer who is also South African, I engage the tension between the ‘tyranny of our history’ and the making of work that resists the spectacle of apartheid and didactic, authoritarian modes of representation. Kentridge registers his presence both through his voice and through animated drawings or filmed performances. He literally inhabits the internal life of the visual and sonic worlds he imagines. He is present in all of their sensations, affects, competing narratives, tensions, ambiguities, and complicities. Yet, in 1990, when Kentridge says ‘our history’, who inhabits this space of collectivity indicated by the possessive determiner ‘our’? When he inserts his body into his work and I, as a viewer, read this representation and its relationship to the bodies, maps, sounds, images, and texts that populate the work, is it possible to maintain a sense of an ‘our’? I navigate this exhibition and its re-imagining of visual and sonic archives that have multiple sites and that are intimately related to a sense of place (South Africa) and yet simultaneously unmoored from any one location, geography, or moment in time. How am I, as a viewer, encountering the idea of the thickness of time (and indeed the thickness of place) through the work and my own subjective navigation of it?
I consider Jo Ractliffe’s exploration, through photographic media and a video, of Vlakplaas, a si... more I consider Jo Ractliffe’s exploration, through photographic media and a video, of Vlakplaas, a site of apartheid-era subterfuge and violence. In the absence of an official historical archive about Vlakplaas, Ractliffe’s practice engages with the violence, opacity and mediated narratives marking its presence historically. The work, an affective and performative intervention into historical and political spaces constituted by secrecy and erasure, might be imagined as an alternative archive. The artist’s performative construction of photographs, which encompass visits to the site of Vlakplaas, and her own situated relationship to photographic practices in South Africa, is emphasised. I explore how Ractliffe re-imagines her Vlakplaas photographs through the video medium in order to elaborate on prior concerns with documentary photography and its truth claims. Criticism wielded against the artist’s Vlakplaas photographs fails to consider the critical, conceptual, ethical and political capacities of the artwork’s affective and empathetic response to a site that exists in an ongoing traumatic relation to apartheid-era violence. I mobilise Dominick LaCapra’s (2001) concept of ‘empathic unsettlement’ and Jill Bennett’s (2005) work on art and trauma, to argue for the work’s particular capacities which reside in its refusal to objectify or speak on behalf of those tortured and killed, and for survivors transformed, in different ways, by lived experiences of racial violence and trauma in South Africa.
Journal of Literary Studies, Dec 2006
This article focuses on the ways in which Foucault's Las Meninas has been represented and critiqu... more This article focuses on the ways in which Foucault's Las Meninas has been represented and critiqued in art‐historical texts and endeavours to gauge its significance to the discipline, in particular, the “New Art History” of the 1970s and 1980s. Art historians have not yet adequately engaged the historical, philosophical, theoretical and methodological dimension of Foucault's articulation of an archaeology of the structures of thought and the significance of this inquiry to the writing of art histories. However, Foucault's unprecedented reading of Velazquez's painting ‐ unfettered by art‐historical methods ‐ played a significant role in facilitating a critique of the limitations of canonical art‐historical interpretive procedures. Art historians Svetlana Alpers, Norman Bryson and Eric Fernie have, for example, drawn attention to the insularity of the discipline; its emphasis on connoisseurship; its preoccupation with the construction of meaning via archival documents and iconographic and stylistic analysis. Against this framework Foucault's elucidation of Las Meninas's self‐reflexive meditation on the nature of representation was groundbreaking.
De Arte, Sep 2004
In 1893 Aubrey Beardsley was commissioned to illustrate the 1894 English edition of Oscar Wilde's... more In 1893 Aubrey Beardsley was commissioned to illustrate the 1894 English edition of Oscar Wilde's notorious play Salome, which Wilde had originally written in French during his stay in Paris in 1891. Both text and illustrations have provoked a great deal of public controversy and while this article does not present a comprehensive account of public reception of the Salome, it will focus on critical debates generated by the responses of state censor, publisher, critics and scholars.
Exhibition Catalogues/Texts for Artists by Yvette Greslé
I Make Art: Sharlene Khan., 2014
PhD Dissertation by Yvette Greslé
This dissertation explores four recent examples of video art by four South African women artists.... more This dissertation explores four recent examples of video art by four South African women artists. It focuses on Jo Ractliffe’s Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting) [1999/2000], Berni Searle’s Mute (2008), Penny Siopis’ Obscure White Messenger (2010) and Minnette Vári’s Chimera (the white edition, 2001 and the black edition 2001-2002).
I consider the visual, sonic, temporal, durational, spatial, sensory and affective capacities of these works, and their encounter with historical events/episodes and figures the significance and affective charge of which move across the eras differentiated as apartheid and post-apartheid. I seek to contribute to critiques of the post-apartheid democracy, and the impetus to move forward from the past, to forgive and reconcile its violence, while not actively and critically engaging historical trauma, and its relation to memory. Each of the videos engaged enter into a dialogue with historical narratives embedded within the experience and memory of violence and racial oppression in South Africa. The study is concerned with the critical significance and temporality of memory in relation to trauma as a historical and psychoanalytical concept applicable to ongoing conditions of historical and political violence and its continuous, apparently irresolvable repetition in political-historical life.
This inquiry is underpinned by art historical approaches to the relationship between art and trauma, and, in particular, the work of Jill Bennett (2005) and Griselda Pollock (2013). It is concerned primarily with Bennett and Pollock’s privileging, from their particular theoretical perspectives, of the affects and internal logics/worlds of art objects, which prompt critical thought, and theoretical and historical inquiry. The particular temporality of video is engaged through historical and psychoanalytical concepts of trauma. The videos selected for this dissertation suggest ideas of temporal and spatial disorientation, displacement, collapse, and irresolvable repetitive return. The opacity that characterises the works is a major point of emphasis, and is related to the dissertation’s concern with trauma, racial oppression and historical/epistemic violence.
A major concern is how artists and scholars enter into dialogues with history, from the perspectives of their own subjectivities, without reinscribing historical and epistemic violence, and the objectification of marginalised subjects. Situated within the parameters of feminist ethics the study foregrounds women artists. I argue for an ethics that takes into account self-reflexivity, and the artist’s, and the scholar’s, situated relationship to history, in the aftermath of sustained historical racial oppression and authoritarianism. It considers the possibilities of art objects as sites that facilitate empathetic, critical and intellectually engaged encounters with historical trauma and violence in South Africa. The videos explored counter spectacle and didactic, and authoritarian, modes of representation. In the absence of a sustained and visible art historical narrative of the history of video art in South Africa, the study focuses on work representative of the earliest, documented examples of video art by women artists, which emerge out of the transition from apartheid. The tension between history’s relationship to objectivity, detachment and empirical knowledge, and its participation in subjective, imaginary, and performative processes underpins the study.
Symposia/Workshops by Yvette Greslé
Conference Presentations by Yvette Greslé
This conference paper was presented at the Archives Matter Conference 2016: Queer, Feminist and D... more This conference paper was presented at the Archives Matter Conference 2016: Queer, Feminist and Decolonial Encounters, the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths.
I focus on a video artwork by the Greek/South African artist Penny Siopis titled Obscure White Messenger (2010) in order to think about how the moving image encounters historical events, and the archives, official/unofficial, they bring into being. This video stages an elusive encounter with the figure of Demitrios Tsafendas who stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called ‘architect of apartheid’, to death in the House of Assembly, Cape Town, 6 September 1966. The work is constructed entirely from found footage discovered, often serendipitously, in markets, and second hand shops, in Greece and South Africa. It also deploys sound, and the device of the subtitle. I experience the work as murky, disorientating and opaque. It is characterised by a certain impenetrability, a refusal to tell me what it is about in any didactic and definitive sense. It draws me into an awareness of my own subjectivity, of my own psychic projections, and of what it is I “feel” as I encounter history through the visual, sonic, and textual registers of an artwork that moves. In considering the opacity of the work, and its affective capacities, I mobilise Catherine Russell’s (1999) concept of ‘experimental ethnography’, her analysis of ‘found footage as ethnography’, and her conception of found-footage filmmaking as ‘allegories of history’ to argue for the work’s resistance to the spectacle of apartheid, authoritarian modes of thought, and the further violation and objectification of a marginalised subject imagined in post-apartheid discourse through various kinds of archival materials constituted by legal, medical, penal, media and cultural discourses.
Books by Yvette Greslé
Unearthed, 2019
‘I grew up with the ordinariness of the colonial order of things and the banality of apartheid in... more ‘I grew up with the ordinariness of the colonial order of things and the banality of apartheid in the spaces where other whites, like me, lived …’ Unearthed demonstrates, through a weave of time and place – be it then or now, the Seychelles, Johannesburg or London – how the ‘ordinariness’ of prejudice and violence persists. Raising memory from burden to force, this book pulls you in and takes you to an understanding of why it is important to speak.
‘Yvette Greslé manages what many cannot – she reclaims memory without falling prey to sentimentality. Achingly spare, Unearthed is a haunting catalogue of remembrance, an unflinching and melancholic examination of racism and privilege.’ Sisonke Msimang
Using Penny Siopis’s site-specific and ephemeral encounter with the Freud Museum in Hampstead, Lo... more Using Penny Siopis’s site-specific and ephemeral encounter with the Freud Museum in Hampstead, London as a lens, I reflect on the ethics of my own subjective and situated relationship to historical knowledge and how I mobilise archival spaces, historical sources and sites of inquiry. Curated by Jennifer Law in 2005, Siopis’s exhibition, entitled Three Essays on Shame, situated objects, found materials, sound and moving image in dialogue with three rooms in the Freud Museum and the furnishings and objects within them. I engage Mark Godfrey’s (2007) essay ‘Artist as historian’ to think about Siopis’s formation of an artist’s archive. The encounters Siopis stages between art and historical and archival sites are never absolutely determinable. These encounters and their ethical-political significance may remain opaque, unsignifiable and open to imaginary, affective, performative and poetic processes.
In this chapter, I stage a deliberately subjective encounter with the site of the Freud Museum and Siopis’s intervention there in 2005, considering my own proximity to histories of apartheid as a subject classified white, and the ethical questions and feelings this produces. This ethical positioning foregrounds the methodological question of how it is the scholar is constituted as a historical subject in relation to histories of apartheid and its violence (which encompasses questions related to the politics of representation itself). I draw out particular thematic and historical threads from a site that I experience through affect, sensation and emotion, which I argue is also a significant aspect of Siopis’s practice as an artist. I put forward the idea that it is through a simultaneously imaginative and critical engagement with this sphere of human experience that normative thinking and canonical knowledge formations might be disrupted and placed under scrutiny. I consider how particular historical-geographical conditions of violence related to anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and apartheid brush up against each other through Siopis’s intervention within the particular space of the Freud Museum, which in itself is weighted with particular significations, memories and affects. I argue that the relational aspect of shame suggested by the curation of Siopis’s work at the Freud Museum, and the capacity for an empathetic encounter with another, which it suggests, is where its political-ethical significance rests. I mobilise the ethics of Dominick LaCapra’s (2001) concept of “empathic unsettlement” as I foreground histories of racial violence that are historically and geographically specific, and inflected by intimate and personal experiences made public.
Papers by Yvette Greslé
Critical Arts, 2015
Abstract I consider Jo Ractliffe's exploration, through photographic media and a video, of Vl... more Abstract I consider Jo Ractliffe's exploration, through photographic media and a video, of Vlakplaas, a site of apartheid-era subterfuge and violence. In the absence of an official historical archive about Vlakplaas, Ractliffe's practice engages with the violence, opacity and mediated narratives marking its presence historically. The work, an affective and performative intervention into historical and political spaces constituted by secrecy and erasure, might be imagined as an alternative archive. The artist's performative construction of photographs, which encompass visits to the site of Vlakplaas, and her own situated relationship to photographic practices in South Africa, is emphasised. I explore how Ractliffe re-imagines her Vlakplaas photographs through the video medium in order to elaborate on prior concerns with documentary photography and its truth claims. Criticism wielded against the artist's Vlakplaas photographs fails to consider the critical, conceptual, ethical and political capacities of the artwork's affective and empathetic response to a site that exists in an ongoing traumatic relation to apartheid-era violence. I mobilise Dominick LaCapra's (2001) concept of ‘empathic unsettlement’ and Jill Bennett's (2005) work on art and trauma, to argue for the work's particular capacities which reside in its refusal to objectify or speak on behalf of those tortured and killed, and for survivors transformed, in different ways, by lived experiences of racial violence and trauma in South Africa.
Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2017
The reviewer pays close attention to the conceptual strategies present in a new body of work by P... more The reviewer pays close attention to the conceptual strategies present in a new body of work by Phoebe Boswell. Produced for a solo exhibition in 2017 at Tiwani Contemporary, London, the work builds on the artist’s exploration of drawing, animation, and technology. The exhibition title, Phoebe Boswell: For Every Real Word Spoken, is taken from Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1977). The exhibition is composed of a series of eight drawings of eight female figures, an animation, and ephemeral drawings and texts on the gallery walls. Each sitter, who is unclothed and meets the viewer’s gaze in a feminist gesture, holds a mobile phone inscribed with a barcode. Viewers can scan the barcodes from their smartphones via a QR scanner in order to access a digital space. The reviewer stages a subjective and experiential encounter with the work as she focuses on spatial dynamics and the ethics and politics of audience participation. The work expands political and ethical questions about woman as “sign” and the tensions that exist within the idea of woman as a collective “we.” The reviewer foregrounds the dense intertextuality of Boswell’s practice, which brings histories and experiences across temporal and geographical sites into a relation. The reviewer draws from Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017) as she engages the work as a site of feminist memory. She positions Ahmed’s performative, autobiographical, political, and theoretical encounter with bodies that are not accommodated by normative social, political, and institutional spaces in dialogue with Boswell’s work.
Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2017
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Journal Articles (Peer-Reviewed) by Yvette Greslé
Exhibition Catalogues/Texts for Artists by Yvette Greslé
PhD Dissertation by Yvette Greslé
I consider the visual, sonic, temporal, durational, spatial, sensory and affective capacities of these works, and their encounter with historical events/episodes and figures the significance and affective charge of which move across the eras differentiated as apartheid and post-apartheid. I seek to contribute to critiques of the post-apartheid democracy, and the impetus to move forward from the past, to forgive and reconcile its violence, while not actively and critically engaging historical trauma, and its relation to memory. Each of the videos engaged enter into a dialogue with historical narratives embedded within the experience and memory of violence and racial oppression in South Africa. The study is concerned with the critical significance and temporality of memory in relation to trauma as a historical and psychoanalytical concept applicable to ongoing conditions of historical and political violence and its continuous, apparently irresolvable repetition in political-historical life.
This inquiry is underpinned by art historical approaches to the relationship between art and trauma, and, in particular, the work of Jill Bennett (2005) and Griselda Pollock (2013). It is concerned primarily with Bennett and Pollock’s privileging, from their particular theoretical perspectives, of the affects and internal logics/worlds of art objects, which prompt critical thought, and theoretical and historical inquiry. The particular temporality of video is engaged through historical and psychoanalytical concepts of trauma. The videos selected for this dissertation suggest ideas of temporal and spatial disorientation, displacement, collapse, and irresolvable repetitive return. The opacity that characterises the works is a major point of emphasis, and is related to the dissertation’s concern with trauma, racial oppression and historical/epistemic violence.
A major concern is how artists and scholars enter into dialogues with history, from the perspectives of their own subjectivities, without reinscribing historical and epistemic violence, and the objectification of marginalised subjects. Situated within the parameters of feminist ethics the study foregrounds women artists. I argue for an ethics that takes into account self-reflexivity, and the artist’s, and the scholar’s, situated relationship to history, in the aftermath of sustained historical racial oppression and authoritarianism. It considers the possibilities of art objects as sites that facilitate empathetic, critical and intellectually engaged encounters with historical trauma and violence in South Africa. The videos explored counter spectacle and didactic, and authoritarian, modes of representation. In the absence of a sustained and visible art historical narrative of the history of video art in South Africa, the study focuses on work representative of the earliest, documented examples of video art by women artists, which emerge out of the transition from apartheid. The tension between history’s relationship to objectivity, detachment and empirical knowledge, and its participation in subjective, imaginary, and performative processes underpins the study.
Symposia/Workshops by Yvette Greslé
Conference Presentations by Yvette Greslé
I focus on a video artwork by the Greek/South African artist Penny Siopis titled Obscure White Messenger (2010) in order to think about how the moving image encounters historical events, and the archives, official/unofficial, they bring into being. This video stages an elusive encounter with the figure of Demitrios Tsafendas who stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called ‘architect of apartheid’, to death in the House of Assembly, Cape Town, 6 September 1966. The work is constructed entirely from found footage discovered, often serendipitously, in markets, and second hand shops, in Greece and South Africa. It also deploys sound, and the device of the subtitle. I experience the work as murky, disorientating and opaque. It is characterised by a certain impenetrability, a refusal to tell me what it is about in any didactic and definitive sense. It draws me into an awareness of my own subjectivity, of my own psychic projections, and of what it is I “feel” as I encounter history through the visual, sonic, and textual registers of an artwork that moves. In considering the opacity of the work, and its affective capacities, I mobilise Catherine Russell’s (1999) concept of ‘experimental ethnography’, her analysis of ‘found footage as ethnography’, and her conception of found-footage filmmaking as ‘allegories of history’ to argue for the work’s resistance to the spectacle of apartheid, authoritarian modes of thought, and the further violation and objectification of a marginalised subject imagined in post-apartheid discourse through various kinds of archival materials constituted by legal, medical, penal, media and cultural discourses.
Books by Yvette Greslé
‘Yvette Greslé manages what many cannot – she reclaims memory without falling prey to sentimentality. Achingly spare, Unearthed is a haunting catalogue of remembrance, an unflinching and melancholic examination of racism and privilege.’ Sisonke Msimang
In this chapter, I stage a deliberately subjective encounter with the site of the Freud Museum and Siopis’s intervention there in 2005, considering my own proximity to histories of apartheid as a subject classified white, and the ethical questions and feelings this produces. This ethical positioning foregrounds the methodological question of how it is the scholar is constituted as a historical subject in relation to histories of apartheid and its violence (which encompasses questions related to the politics of representation itself). I draw out particular thematic and historical threads from a site that I experience through affect, sensation and emotion, which I argue is also a significant aspect of Siopis’s practice as an artist. I put forward the idea that it is through a simultaneously imaginative and critical engagement with this sphere of human experience that normative thinking and canonical knowledge formations might be disrupted and placed under scrutiny. I consider how particular historical-geographical conditions of violence related to anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and apartheid brush up against each other through Siopis’s intervention within the particular space of the Freud Museum, which in itself is weighted with particular significations, memories and affects. I argue that the relational aspect of shame suggested by the curation of Siopis’s work at the Freud Museum, and the capacity for an empathetic encounter with another, which it suggests, is where its political-ethical significance rests. I mobilise the ethics of Dominick LaCapra’s (2001) concept of “empathic unsettlement” as I foreground histories of racial violence that are historically and geographically specific, and inflected by intimate and personal experiences made public.
Papers by Yvette Greslé
I consider the visual, sonic, temporal, durational, spatial, sensory and affective capacities of these works, and their encounter with historical events/episodes and figures the significance and affective charge of which move across the eras differentiated as apartheid and post-apartheid. I seek to contribute to critiques of the post-apartheid democracy, and the impetus to move forward from the past, to forgive and reconcile its violence, while not actively and critically engaging historical trauma, and its relation to memory. Each of the videos engaged enter into a dialogue with historical narratives embedded within the experience and memory of violence and racial oppression in South Africa. The study is concerned with the critical significance and temporality of memory in relation to trauma as a historical and psychoanalytical concept applicable to ongoing conditions of historical and political violence and its continuous, apparently irresolvable repetition in political-historical life.
This inquiry is underpinned by art historical approaches to the relationship between art and trauma, and, in particular, the work of Jill Bennett (2005) and Griselda Pollock (2013). It is concerned primarily with Bennett and Pollock’s privileging, from their particular theoretical perspectives, of the affects and internal logics/worlds of art objects, which prompt critical thought, and theoretical and historical inquiry. The particular temporality of video is engaged through historical and psychoanalytical concepts of trauma. The videos selected for this dissertation suggest ideas of temporal and spatial disorientation, displacement, collapse, and irresolvable repetitive return. The opacity that characterises the works is a major point of emphasis, and is related to the dissertation’s concern with trauma, racial oppression and historical/epistemic violence.
A major concern is how artists and scholars enter into dialogues with history, from the perspectives of their own subjectivities, without reinscribing historical and epistemic violence, and the objectification of marginalised subjects. Situated within the parameters of feminist ethics the study foregrounds women artists. I argue for an ethics that takes into account self-reflexivity, and the artist’s, and the scholar’s, situated relationship to history, in the aftermath of sustained historical racial oppression and authoritarianism. It considers the possibilities of art objects as sites that facilitate empathetic, critical and intellectually engaged encounters with historical trauma and violence in South Africa. The videos explored counter spectacle and didactic, and authoritarian, modes of representation. In the absence of a sustained and visible art historical narrative of the history of video art in South Africa, the study focuses on work representative of the earliest, documented examples of video art by women artists, which emerge out of the transition from apartheid. The tension between history’s relationship to objectivity, detachment and empirical knowledge, and its participation in subjective, imaginary, and performative processes underpins the study.
I focus on a video artwork by the Greek/South African artist Penny Siopis titled Obscure White Messenger (2010) in order to think about how the moving image encounters historical events, and the archives, official/unofficial, they bring into being. This video stages an elusive encounter with the figure of Demitrios Tsafendas who stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd, the so-called ‘architect of apartheid’, to death in the House of Assembly, Cape Town, 6 September 1966. The work is constructed entirely from found footage discovered, often serendipitously, in markets, and second hand shops, in Greece and South Africa. It also deploys sound, and the device of the subtitle. I experience the work as murky, disorientating and opaque. It is characterised by a certain impenetrability, a refusal to tell me what it is about in any didactic and definitive sense. It draws me into an awareness of my own subjectivity, of my own psychic projections, and of what it is I “feel” as I encounter history through the visual, sonic, and textual registers of an artwork that moves. In considering the opacity of the work, and its affective capacities, I mobilise Catherine Russell’s (1999) concept of ‘experimental ethnography’, her analysis of ‘found footage as ethnography’, and her conception of found-footage filmmaking as ‘allegories of history’ to argue for the work’s resistance to the spectacle of apartheid, authoritarian modes of thought, and the further violation and objectification of a marginalised subject imagined in post-apartheid discourse through various kinds of archival materials constituted by legal, medical, penal, media and cultural discourses.
‘Yvette Greslé manages what many cannot – she reclaims memory without falling prey to sentimentality. Achingly spare, Unearthed is a haunting catalogue of remembrance, an unflinching and melancholic examination of racism and privilege.’ Sisonke Msimang
In this chapter, I stage a deliberately subjective encounter with the site of the Freud Museum and Siopis’s intervention there in 2005, considering my own proximity to histories of apartheid as a subject classified white, and the ethical questions and feelings this produces. This ethical positioning foregrounds the methodological question of how it is the scholar is constituted as a historical subject in relation to histories of apartheid and its violence (which encompasses questions related to the politics of representation itself). I draw out particular thematic and historical threads from a site that I experience through affect, sensation and emotion, which I argue is also a significant aspect of Siopis’s practice as an artist. I put forward the idea that it is through a simultaneously imaginative and critical engagement with this sphere of human experience that normative thinking and canonical knowledge formations might be disrupted and placed under scrutiny. I consider how particular historical-geographical conditions of violence related to anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and apartheid brush up against each other through Siopis’s intervention within the particular space of the Freud Museum, which in itself is weighted with particular significations, memories and affects. I argue that the relational aspect of shame suggested by the curation of Siopis’s work at the Freud Museum, and the capacity for an empathetic encounter with another, which it suggests, is where its political-ethical significance rests. I mobilise the ethics of Dominick LaCapra’s (2001) concept of “empathic unsettlement” as I foreground histories of racial violence that are historically and geographically specific, and inflected by intimate and personal experiences made public.