黑料不打烊

This exhibition features the work of 18 photographers, new media and video artists, who lived and worked in South Africa during the apartheid era (1948-1994), though a few now live elsewhere. Darkroom鈥檚 eight sections highlight the ways that these artists have addressed South African culture from various perspectives, and their increased presence in the global art world since 1994. It examines the use of analog and digital media, still and moving pictures, and two- and three-dimensional formats to express relationships between mid-twentieth-century approaches and more recent ones, and differing concerns among artists of successive generations.

The show has a particular resonance to Birmingham audiences. 鈥淭here are remarkable parallels between Birmingham鈥檚 Civil Rights history and the Apartheid Era in South Africa,鈥� said Ron Platt, the BMA鈥檚 Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. 鈥淭he photographs and video in this exhibition vividly convey this time in South African history, and I wanted to share with our audience how people there lived through something remarkably similar to what happened in Alabama, and how what happened here impacted people on the other side of the World. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu often cited Birmingham鈥檚 nonviolent demonstrations as inspirational to the Apartheid Movement.鈥�
 
About the Art
Through the combination of vintage prints, recent photographs, photo-based installations, and video art, Darkroom underscores photography鈥檚 role in documenting some of apartheid鈥檚 most riveting moments, while considering myriad ways that South Africans resisted apartheid, and have emerged from it. Prior to Darkroom鈥檚 exhibition in Richmond at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from August 21 to October 24, 2010, these works had never been shown together in the United States in this context.

鈥淒arkroom provides a chance for audiences in Richmond and Birmingham to see works by these internationally celebrated artists who have contributed greatly to global trends in contemporary art through their perseverance and technical excellence,鈥� says Tosha Grantham, exhibition curator. 鈥淛uxtaposing historical material and recent work emphasizes the camera鈥檚 power and possibilities, and the ways that these artists have explored this conceptually in their work.鈥�

Accompanying the exhibition is the catalogue Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa since 1950 by Tosha Grantham. The book won the gold medal in the Multicultural Non-Fiction Adult category of the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards.About the Artists
Darkroom includes 18 artists who span four generations: fourteen are South African; four are from England, the United States, and Germany, and either made South Africa their home or created significant bodies of work there. The works were made from 1950 to 2008. Featured artists are: William Kentridge, Robin Rhode, J眉rgen Schadeberg, Nontsikelelo Veleko and Sue Williamson.

This exhibition has been organized by the Virg inia Museum of Fine Arts with the support of the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Exhibition Endowment, The Andy Warhol Foundat ion for the Visual Arts , the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundat ion. General exhibition support is provided by the City of Birming ham and the Alabama State Council on the Arts, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.