Architecture and an Aesthetics of Exclusion : Angela Ferreira's South facing

Abstract

In this thesis I analyse the work of Ângela Ferreira rendered through the exhibition South Facing at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2017. The Ângela Ferreira exhibition, South Facing is a prime example of the myriad ways that exhibitions dialogue with history, represent a politics, subtly re-enforce notions of access, accessibility and recourse to space and representation. As a researcher spurred by an interest in the inflection of gender and globalisation, I read the exhibition as one that, through a construction of a history conceived through the grand discourses of colonialism and modernism, misses the nuances embedded in the quotidian and lived experiences of black women. I explore the extent to which the artist is responsible for representing nuanced and intricate histories, especially when their work is a self-proclaimed critique of colonialism and its associated aesthetic and spatial practices. Hence, I motivate for a feminist critique of the exhibition and describe the ways in which gender, which is an important conceptual framework, has been ignored. Through an excavation of negated historical accounts, I detail how black women are unaccounted for in Ferreira’s project. I argue that although the exhibition allows for a “situated reading of modernist praxis in a colonial context” (Liscombe, 2006), it also reinforces the absence of black women in historical accounts of the apartheid spatial imagining. Ferreira pivots her artistic practice around the mining of colonial archive, often opining that she reads buildings as texts. But because the archive from which she mines for articulations of modernism in Africa is riddled with contradiction and paradox, whereby black women as users of apartheid architectural infrastructure are ignored and their experiences of apartheid spatial imagining elided, the occlusion abides in the artists’ endeavour. Through this analysis, I seek to make salient the ways that the scaffold of apartheid constructed black women as “Othered” and as such other users of the city and detail the ways contemporary curatorial practice has been unable to subvert this exclusion.