Cathy's Art Diary

Moving exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery marking the 1967 book “House of Bondage” by Ernest Cole. Cole published the book in exile in America and it is seen as one of the most important photo books   to record life in Apartheid South Africa and revealing its brutality and injustice to the world. The pictures were shown in the same chapter themes as the book and all the commentaries were in Cole’s own words which added an immediacy to them. The images were clear and effective and told the stories of the people shown simply.    The sheer inhumanity of the stories being told still beggar belief. I kept wondering what had happened to individuals. The most bizarre pictures were of rush hour trains which highlighted the illogical absurdity of making the black populations live a long distance from the cities while providing the Labour needed in them without reasonable train provision. Closed 22 September 2024 Review Telegraph    

Interesting exhibition at the British Museum looking at the art and people of southern Africa. I loved the first section on the ancient art of the area. As it is one of the places where human life began so it is also one of the areas where art began. I was moved by a small pebble with natural markings like a face. This demonstrated the first stage of artistic sensibility, collecting objects which mean something to you, called nominid curiosity. This stone was found in a cave with human remains. It hadn’t come from the surrounding area so must have been found and kept by those people. The show also took you through the other stages from decorating objects and bodies including a necklace of shells which is some of the earliest evidence of body decoration, through to one of the earliest pieces of 2D art, a wonderful antelope type animal scratched onto a rock. The history of the area was told well through the art and I finally understand the Boer War. It had always been ...