17 August 2017 – 29 October 2017
Photo Workshop Gallery
Market Photo Workshop
Four Dilemmas is an encounter with the archival through the Market Photo Workshop’s picture holdings. Four Dilemmas began as an exhibition project and inquiry into women-led photography produced through the Photo Workshop’s courses, mentorships and public projects from 2004 – 2017, and developed into an interrogation of the archival as a system that unfolds across economics, ownership, memory, capitalism, community and representation.
The inquiry revealed four essential dilemmas in negotiating this territory of images – the question of photographic accesibility, circulation and erasure; the effects of an archival gaze on photographic works that negotiate female subjectivity; the complicity of the process of archiving with colonial taxonomies and knowledge regimes; and finally, the effect of entering images that have not been very visible into the space of an exhibition.
The project presents a selection of womxn’s photographic work that negotiate archives through landscape, the body and the photo album, alongside placeholders and cues for further interogations – from symbolic voids that can be encountered as the negative spaces of loss or as positive spaces that demarcate ground to build on, to various texts that complicate the exhibition and the archival.
Four Dilemmas invites propositions through the space that holds it and through a parallel public programme that will unfold in relation to the dilemmas expressed. The project attempts to lay an initial ground for engagement that can be taken forward and beyond the dilemmas that it frames through this iteration.
Photographers: Keorapetse Mosimane, Doris Nzimande, Lebohang Kganye, Samantha Simons, Zanele Muholi, Phumzile Khanyile, Simangele Kalisa, Babalwa Mtanga, and Sydelle Willow Smith.
Four Dilemmas was developed through conversations between Thato Mogotsi and Mika Conradie.
About the Market Photo Workshop
For over twenty-seven years, the Market Photo Workshop has played a pivotal role in the training of South Africa’s photographers, ensuring that visual literacy reaches neglected and marginalized parts of our society. World renowned photographer, David Goldblatt contributed vastly to the establishment of Market Photo Workshop in 1988 – 1999. Since then, the Photo Workshop has been an agent of change and representation, informing photographers, visual artists, educators, students and broader communities of trends, issues, and debates in photography and visual culture.
The Market Photo Workshop also runs a number of Public Programmes, which are a series of events involving and directed at professional photographers, visual artists, educators, students as well as the broader public. These Public Programmes seek to inform the trends, practices, methods, and contemporary ways of working and thinking in South African photography practice through exposure to a broad understanding of visual culture as well as a networking platform that encourages critical thinking and engagements.
Showcasing a number of high profile local and international photographers, as well as student and alumni photography work, the Market Photo Workshop has been able to build a strong and consistent audience base around our gallery, ‘The Photo Workshop Gallery’ in Newtown, which is on the same premises as the school. Since 2005, when the gallery was initially launched, the kind of platform it has engendered encourages not only emerging students to experience and enter into professional practice, but has distilled a new type of photographic practice amongst the greater artistic community. Various critical discourses, especially around the role documentary photography, have been stimulated by the multitude of exhibitions that have shown at The Photo Workshop Gallery creating dynamic interactions between students and the greater photography community. In 2017, Market Photo Workshop relocated to its new state of art photography facility at Market Square premises by the Mary Fitzgerald Square.
For more information, please contact:
Mika Conradie
Manager: Public Programmes and Development
T +27 (0) 11 834 1444
E-mail: mikac@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
and
Thato Mogotsi
mogotsit@gmail.com
Market Photo Workshop
c/o Market Square
138 Lilian Ngoyi St
Entrance at Margaret Macingana Street
Newtown
Johannesburg
info@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
www.marketphotoworkshop.co.za
The Market Photo Workshop is a division of The Market Theatre Foundation.