RE-MEMBERING: MEMORY, INTIMACY, ARCHIVE

Collaborative exhibition featuring works by Sharlene Khan, Jordache A. Ellapen and Reshma Chhiba

22-25 June 2018, Michaelis Galleries, University of Cape Town
31-37 Orange Street, Gardens, Cape Town
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Friday, 11- 4pm
Contact Nkule Mabaso on 021 650 7170 for more information

The exhibition Re-membering: Memory, Intimacy, Archive features works by South African artists Reshma Chhiba, Sharlene Khan and Jordache A. Ellapen from their projects titled Kali (2008) and The Two Talking Yonis (2013); When the Moon Waxes Red (2016); and Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy (2016) respectively. In these projects, through the lens of the ‘Indian’ experience, these artists explore and unsettle notions of memory, race, class, gender, and sexuality in post-apartheid South Africa and comment on the nuances and complexities of everyday life in South Africa. In Chhiba’s works, the Indian goddess Kāli is a central starting point where particular reference is made to her iconography and mythology. For her series, Khan works with different visual media like video-art, digital photography, and needle-lace to produce “visual textured narratives”, which narrate the difficult circumstances experienced by migratory women. Ellapen engages black and white archival studio photographs and digital photographs to produce digital “visual assemblages” that disrupts the heteronormative logics of family, community, and nation. Their works jointly speak to everyday experiences and performativities of identities shaped through the tensions of cultural migrations, familial love, loss and mythologies that are too often simplistically and sentimentally rendered. These entanglements add richness to a segment of South African history that is still lacking.

Re-membering Lunchtime Lecture, UCT 25 July 2018

Lunchtime lecture by Sharlene Khan and Reshma Chhiba on their exhibition with Jordache Ellapen “Re-membering: Memory, Intimacy, Archive” held at the University of Cape Town, 25 July 2018