Jabulani Dhlamini / Isisekelo 2019
Goodman Gallery Johannesburg 17 April – 11 May 2019
For his fourth exhibition with Goodman Gallery, Jabulani Dhlamini presents a recent series of photographs taken across the country and continent. Integrating ethnographic and autobiographic approaches to image making, Dhlamini unpacks our subjective relationship to space. Marking a departure for Dhlamini, this work sits between figuration and abstraction which results in images that are both decisive and critical, resisting easy interpretation or categorisation.
In late 2016 Dhlamini travelled to his birthplace in the province of Free State to visit his great grandfather’s grave. The site was on a farm which had been home to several generations of Dhlamini’s family, who ‘earned the right’ to live there during apartheid as long as a male member of the family worked the land. The family later lost their access to the land when Dhlamini’s uncle, who had lived on the plot for over 50 years, passed away leaving no one to take over his ‘duty’.
Artworks
About
Jabulani Dhlamini
Jabulani Dhlamini (b. 1983, Warden, South Africa) is a documentary photographer whose practice reflects on his upbringing in the post-apartheid era alongside the experiences of local South African communities. Dhlamini’s most celebrated bodies of work have focused on key moments in South African history, such as Recaptured which looks at cross-generational recollections of the Sharpeville Massacre, and Isisekelo which documents the familial impact of land dispossession and iQhawekazi, which mapped the shifting legacy of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at the time of her death in 2018.
Solo exhibitions include: Casa/iKhaya Lami, Mitre Gallery, Brazil (2023); Isisekelo, Goodman Gallery Johannesburg (2019); Recaptured, Goodman Gallery Cape Town (2016); uMama, Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg (2012). Group exhibitions: Inganekwane, North West University Gallery, South Africa (2022); iHubo – Whispers, PhotoSaintGermain festival, France (2022); Side to Side Johannesburg, La Permanence Photographique, France (2022); and A Different Now is Close Enough to Exhale on You, Umhlabathi Collective Gallery, South Africa (2022); Five Photographers. A tribute to David Goldblatt, Gerard Sekoto Gallery, French Institute of South Africa and the Alliance Française of Johannesburg. Dhlamini is an alumni fellow of the Edward Ruiz Mentorship programme and the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg.
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