Eflux announcement, Curator of House of Photography, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany.
“I’m pleased to welcome Nadine Isabelle Henrich as our new curator. She is an innovative and internationally well-connected photography expert. Her forward-thinking exhibition concepts impressed us immediately. As a connoisseur of both the German and the international art scenes, Nadine Isabelle Henrich will continue the success story of the House of Photography, founded by F.C. Gundlach in 2003.”
Poetics of Search on view at Fotozentrum Schweiz
On View until February 12, 2023. More Info here.
Symposium Looking for Photography: Navigating, Collecting and Curating Photographic Data, May 27-28, 2022
Juntos / Bî Hevra premiered September 9, 2021 at Galerie im Körnerpark in Berlin!
April 2021: Short Interview with artist
BUHLEBEZWE SIWANI
on her photographic work Mnguni (2019), her thoughts on the history of land in South Africa, its layers of memory, ancestoral connections and colonialism.
© Buhlebezwe Siwani, Courtesy Madragoa, Lisbon.
NH: I want to learn more about the title and its relation to the Mnguni people. Is the performance and photographic work related to your ancestral roots, and how do the clothes, movements and objects involved relate to the Mnguni people and what meanings do they carry for you personally?
BS: The title is of course a direct translation, Mnguni is a standalone, whereas Nguni is not. So I am speaking to a specific person that is linked to all people in Sub Saharan Africa.
My photographic and performative work is always related to the idea of the ancestral landscape and how we traverse it in our present. The costume is always related to the subject matter, sometimes the costumes are changed slightly so that we complicate the subject a little more and also add a feel of the contemporary, every object has a meaning or there is meaning imbued in the objects, The chair is a Dutch antique, an object that belongs in the space, the body (mine) is not of this place hence being costumed in clothing from my own country.
NH: On the land - How is your relation to the land as a container of (colonial) history and your personal relation to the past?
BS: The land speaks volumes about who we are and how things evolve, and who has been there. It speaks about the trials and tribulations, especially South Africa where people have been uprooted and land taken from them, how do you say home if you have always known home to belong to a former master?
The history of land in South Africa is well known throughout the world but there are intricacies that people can be ignorant to, especially if they have not been there or live in a bubble.
NH: On Photography - I have the impression that the photograph in your practice is more than pure documentation of performance, in the sense that it also relates to the history of photography? Could you tell me a bit about how you relate to the medium and how you use it?
BS: I use photography as a self documentation tool, but also as a tool that captures a moment, a time, a society and a soul.