Hentie van der Merwe

FILM IN COLLABORATION WITH DIRECTOR AMANDA EVANS WITH MUSIC BY PHILIP MILLER

Goodman Gallery Cape proudly presents Hentie van der Merwe’s exhibition, figuring II: Heiseb, which extends the artist’s current interest in an archive of Nama (Khoi) folktales he recently discovered in Germany.

The tales were recorded by the German folklorist Sigrid Schmidt in Namibia during the last forty years of the twentieth century while ‘working with the Nama people’. The artist explores the overlap between Nama and Afrikaans folktales; in particular, the inclusions and exclusions of stories and details of a far more complex and violent nature that have come to preoccupy the artist and serve as impulse for much of his recent work. In many instances the grotesque, Rabelaisean nature of these stories become vehicles for continued investigations of ideas present in earlier work, such as the body, violence, power and history.