Dis-Location/Re-Location: “Aloerosa”

This paper explores ways in which difference is grafted into/onto skin, with reference to a selected series of photographic prints. These prints form part of a larger body of artwork and an educational program and research project, titled Dis-location/Re-location. The project investigates personalized postcolonial identity through reference to colonialism, geographies, histories, political positions, and cultural affiliations. Artwork is used as a space within which to interrogate personal and collective relationships to South African British colonial history and its current personal and public residues of identity construction within the context of postcolonial, post-apartheid South Africa. In the artwork, skin forms a figurative and metaphorical site of intervention for the grafting of tensions, ambiguities, and differences in the formation of new hybrid, transforming conceptions of personal and collective identity formations.