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18/7/2008

Hentie van der Merwe

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

This new body of work is an extension of the artist’s current interest in an archive of Nama folktales he recently discovered in Germany. The tales were recorded by the German folklorist Sigrid Schmidt during the last 40 years of the 20th century – this in Namibia around the area where the artist grew up. Schmidt became interested in studying the traditions of the Nama-speaking peoples whilst spending time in Namibia in the early 1960’s. Between 1972 and 1997 she returned eight times to this country to collect further material. These field trips resulted in an audio archive consisting of hundreds of hours of recorded Nama folk narratives.

The artist recognized many of the recorded tales in the archive as versions of stories he had heard as a child – this due to the fact that over the years a significant amount of Nama (or Khoi) culture had been absorbed into that of the Afrikaners, and vice versa. However, the archive also contains stories he had never heard before. Stories of a far more complex and violent nature and which can be perceived as posing a threat to a Christian worldview. This probably accounts for why they were so firmly excluded from Afrikaner culture. It is these stories in particular that have come to fascinate the artist and served as impulse for many of the works on the exhibition. In many instances the grotesque, Rabelaisean nature of these stories became vehicles for the artist’s investigations of ideas already familiar to his work, such as the body, violence, power and history.

Another major impulse for the works on this exhibition is the body of the German emperor Wilhelm II, who was the leader of Germany at the time of it’s colonization of Namibia (then German South-West Africa) towards the end of the 19th century. The emperor’s body, which was deformed due to a complicated birth, together with his complex psychological and sexual make-up, have come to extensively preoccupy the artist during the making of the works on display.

Goodman Gallery
163 Jan Smuts Avenue - Johannesburg

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