For the past ten years Siemon Allen has been exploring the image of South Africa through a series of collection projects. His studio practice has evolved out of an interest in how mass-produced items – newspapers, stamps, magazines, records – function as carriers of information and operate in the construction of national identity.
Allen’s most recent collection project, Records, is rooted in an extensive archive of South African audio consisting of over 2500 items including 650 rare shellac discs. The project has generated a series of varied works sourced from this ongoing audio collection including a number of site responsive installation works, a series of large-scale digital prints, and a searchable web-based database that can be viewed at www.flatinternational.org.
For his first solo show in Cape Town at Goodman Gallery, Allen will present Labels – an architectural site-responsive installation – as well as a new series of prints sourced from the audio archive. Labels functions as an historical record, a chronological discography of select labels from Allen’s archive. It is also a kind of visual memorial to South Africa’s rich musical past in that each label represents an individual recording, paying homage to that past visually by naming every artist in the archive. Some names and recordings are well known, but many more are now forgotten.