Exhibitions Apertures and Imaginaries: Lessons from Snap Judgments

EXHIBITIONS APERTURES AND IMAGINARIES Lessons from Snap J udgments Elizabeth Harney A s I entered the first hushed exhibition rooms of Snap Judgments: New Positions in African Photography at the National Gallery, my eyes were still bleary from the cold and wind of Ottawa's first snows.1 The ethereal works of Hentje van der Merwe's Trappings series (2002-2003) seemed to shimmer and shift before me. It soon became apparent that my eyes were not fooling me. With a handheld camera, long exposure times, and a heavy dose of irony, van der Merwe had photographed these preserved uniforms within the Museum of Military History in Johannesburg, deliberately blurring the images to give the viewer the sensation of peering through the dusty, spotlit vitrines of classic m u s e u m spaces. Disembodied, set apart, and oddly aestheticized by their alluring soft focus and vibrant palette, these objects addressed the disturbing historical links among militarism, masculinity, nationalist narratives, and the visual in South Africa during the apartheid period. Of course, their presence within this exhibition also asked the viewer to consider how contemporary artists engage with the archives of colonial modernity within the postcolony. But what struck me most about the immediate effect of these artworks was their tempting promise of clarity and focus. Encased behind an impenetrable layer of glass in their original museum displays and belonging to another intangible time and space, these uniforms were caught in the camera 's lens and framed again by both its mechanical eye and the exhibition in which they now sat. These lens-based works served as reminders of the shared ontological status of museum exhibitions and photography. Both are concerned with the "organization of the view;"2 both rely upon the manipulation of time and space to achieve meaning (often suggesting timelessness and spatial distancing from the site of the viewer). Van der Merwe's pieces, like many others within Snap Judgments, questioned our inherent practices of viewing and our reliance upon the visual to shape our understanding of the "realities" of the world around us. Just as the forms captured by van der Merwe's camera would remain in focus for only a fleeting moment, the visitor to this exhibition faced the challenge of retaining all the discursive structures challenged by this collection of lens-based works within a single analytic field. While ostensibly a glimpse into the diverse and dynamic practices of contemporary artists at work in cosmopolitan Africa and elsewhere, this exhibition project engaged in a much broader set of politics. First, it dealt with the representational and epistemologi2 8 • N k a Journal of Cont em porary African Art cal frameworks of exhibiting itself, inherited from the modern period. Second, it foregrounded the pathological relationship between Africa and the mythmaking capabilities of photography. Third, it examined the centrality of the archive in the making of modern subjectivity and the contemporary need to dig into or understand the conditions that made it so important. And finally, it sought to trace a new "moment" of shared sensibility, in which contemporary African and diasporic artists turn increasingly toward lens-based practices in order to open a kind of "third space" in which to contemplate the nature of photographic practice and to shape and comment upon the cosmopolitan experiences of today. Van der Merwe's works point to new directions in portraiture and object photography, while those of others within the exhibition recast such familiar genres as landscape, documentary, or fashion photography. As the show's curator, Okwui Enwezor, suggests, the works of this younger generation of artists suggest a developing cosmopolitan imaginary that reconsiders how public discourses and private acts of narrative craft anew our understandings of memory, history , belonging, and becoming. 3 The Allure of Metahistory: Why Africa? Why Photography? If indeed this project evoked a tangled web of relations among Africa, photography, and exhibitionmaking , then it is not surprising that reviews of it, generally brief in nature, were unable to grapple with its larger implications. In a pointed piece in African Arts, Erin Haney and Erika Nimis, both of whom conduct important work on local histories Snap Judgements, Installation view, © International Cent er of Photography, 2006...