25.06.2020 - 07.07.2020
A TIERNEY FELLOWSHIP RETROSPECTIVE at the Market Photo workshop
How had they fallen into this condition when, indeed, they were as human as everyone else? They started to run out into the sunlight, then they turned and looked at the dark, small room. They said: \'We are not going back there.\'" - Bessie Head, Maru (1971)
RECLAMATIONS revisits the longest running mentorship programme in the history of African photography that continues to support young photographers in realising visions that reflect both the aspirations and disquiet of their communities. Since 2008, the Tierney Fellowship in South Africa has been leading in the identification of emerging talent in contemporary photography; the fellows represent a cross-section of photographic concern that remains urgent in our transitioning societies. Awarded at the Market Photo Workshop, these fellows refocus our attention on matters such as gender, race, migration, the divide between urban and rural, land restitution, spirituality, national and familial memory and reclaims them from the histories of their making.
The portraits of late Thabiso Sekgala’s Homelands are psychically-charged interventions that figure moments shared between the photographer and the space he encountered in the former ‘sovereign’ apartheid states of Bophutatswana and KwaNdebele, which were reclaimed into a democratic South Africa as the North-West and Mpumalanga provinces. Sekgala’s left an visual document of an exploration of interior spaces and rural landscapes that ended too soon. Yet, its short intervention reclaimed the prefix of ‘home’ and ‘land’ in the vexed noun of ‘homeland’.
RECLAMATIONS revisits the longest running mentorship programme in the history of African photography that continues to support young photographers in realising visions that reflect both the aspirations and disquiet of their communities. Since 2008, the Tierney Fellowship in South Africa has been leading in the identification of emerging talent in contemporary photography; the fellows represent a cross-section of photographic concern that remains urgent in our transitioning societies. Awarded at the Market Photo Workshop, these fellows refocus our attention on matters such as gender, race, migration, the divide between urban and rural, land restitution, spirituality, national and familial memory and reclaims them from the histories of their making.