Robben Island

This room is where the Apartheid Police forged letters to prisoners, amongst other things. The Mother Fuckers.

Apparently a prisoner received a letter from his wife to say that she was longer in love with him, but in love with another man, and had left the struggle. The letter was penned in writing forged in order to resemble that of the man's wife.

The scan is a rough one.

Baldessari

In his work called 'Throwing 4 Balls in the Air to Get a Square' the artist tries to do as the title suggests. In my estimation he throws tomatoes at the documentary project by implying that formalism and the modernist documentary project are redundant.

A central image in my N1 project has been a this shot which refers to his failed attempt to get a square. The balls to right of frame particularly.

The N1 project never really shows the Road, it exists by implication. And Africa is beset with easy, centralised images of itself.

Cities in Crisis

A large volume has just been published which documents the colloquium that 'Cities in Crisis' was a part of.

Cities in Crisis is an exhibition which I co-curated with my fried, Professor Michael Godby, who is head of the Art History Department at the University of Cape Town. The show was exhibited at the FADA gallery in Johannesburg and is represented on the www at citiesincrisis.com

My two favourite shots are that of David Goldblatt and Guy Tillim which both collapse disparate spaces into coherent, readable space. Goldblatt's shot shows the remains of some kids' game called 'Onopoppi'. The remains are a floor-plan of a house which makes me think that 'poppi' means doll. Behind the floorplan of stones are some unfinished houses so this shot features a cartesian perspective in the foreground, and a more traditional elevations in the background. 10 points.

Guy Tillim's shot fucks with the brain by compositing the shadow of an invisible building behind a water reservoir. The resultant suggestion is a volumetric and spatial impossibility. 10 points.

Mine is the shot of a beachfront.

Go to the www to see the entire show please.