Learn & Teach
Exhibition text (Excerpt)
Alejandra and Philip share a profound concern with notions of beauty and the beautiful, thinking about postcolonial modernities and ways in which regimes of seeing, being seen, thinking about and imagining beauty is tied to forms of violence and ways of life that have a genealogy embedded in colonial knowledge projects and the grooming and construction of modern subjects. Alejandra’s concern is with process, the process of “becoming beautiful […] which is often not so beautiful”, as she describes it. Alejandra’s sensitive work is as much about the powerful act of listening, as it is about intervening. Hair politics, along with the politics of who tells the past and how it is told, is not marginal in Philip’s work. The multiple transversals between form and process are as important as the end goal. His work gently inserts itself, breaks down and re- constructs, in order to carry out an ongoing interrogation of unjust presents we live in.
Nicole Sarmiento, Curator
Cape Town, South Africa
2012
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