‘You wouldn’t know God if he spat in your eye’: impressions from Dumile Feni’s scroll

Abstract

This research report focuses on the curation of Dumile Feni’s scroll, in particular the numerous challenges that the scroll poses to contemporary forms of curation, and what these tell us about the field. It concentrates on two exhibitions: the Dumile Feni Retrospective at Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG: 2005); and Activate/Captivate at Wits Art Museum (WAM: 2016). Both can be understood within the broader call for redress within South Africa’s public museums, and the drive towards transformation and accessibility. Although research to this effect exists, it usually focuses on the need for greater inclusivity and representation, rather than how institutions include and re-present artists. Drawing on theory, archival research, and interviews related to the exhibition of Feni’s scroll, this report aims to complicate our understanding of transformation and accessibility. It highlights how South African institutions continue to privilege eurocentric modes of production, management, and display, albeit couched in what Julie McGee terms “the language of change” (2006: 184). Furthermore, it argues that within the context of South Africa’s public museums, increased accessibility often means absorbing difference, containing conflict, and stripping an artwork of its idiosyncrasies in order to accommodate institutional inertias. Using translation studies as a basis for expanding the parameters of curation, this report questions the mediatory role of curators, arguing “against translation in contexts where being understood is not to the advantage of the speaker” (Coetzee 2013: xi). Rather than trying to make artworks more accessible, this report considers how we might begin to treat loss productively; what we can learn from absence; but also what we can unlearn through it