Personal Accounts / Installation views, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2014

PERSONAL ACCOUNTS

2014

Produced in Cape Town in 2014, this first iteration of Personal Accounts addresses the everyday lived precarity of black and brown women living in South Africa.

In five intimate video portraits, Brenda, Zipho, Mercia, Christolene, and Charmaine (the artist’s mother) bravely disclose personal experiences of physical, sexual, emotional and/or material harm. In a decision taken by the artist, with the prior consent of her collaborators, the spoken words of each video account are withheld. What remains is a paralinguistic sonic stream of in-between moments: breaths, swallows, sighs, cries, humming, even laughter – inducing the beside, nearby, adjacent and beyond of what is said, not said, or if said, not heard. Foregoing lexicality, these modified accounts unsettle the preconditions of ‘legibility’ and ‘believability’ that so regularly undermine the testimonies and experiences of survivors. Asserted instead is the shared breath and presence of the collaborators themselves. This calls for a different kind of relation, a politics of love and avowal that does not disregard intersectional difference, contextual specificities, or the incommensurability of suffering, but asks for more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.

Personal Accounts (2014) was filmed in the artist’s apartment in Cape Town, and produced with the support of St Anne’s Homes, a non-governmental organisation providing shelter, care and empowerment to abused, destitute and pregnant mothers with young children in Cape Town since 1904. 

Video previews of Personal Accounts (2014) are available on request