Sue Williamson


Sue Williamson is an artist and writer based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Life

Sue Williamson was born in Lichfield, England in 1941. In 1948 she immigrated with her family to South Africa. Between 1963 and 1965 she studied at the Art Students League of New York. In 1983 she earned her Advanced Diploma in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town. In 2007 she received the Visual Arts Research Award from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C and in 2011 the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship. In 2013 she was a guest curator of the summer academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.

Work

Williamson's work engages with themes related to memory and identity formation. Trained as a printmaker, Williamson has worked across a variety of media including archival photography, video, mixed media installations, and constructed objects. Her earlier work, such as Mementos of District Six, Out of the Ashes, and R.I.P. Annie Silinga, are a few early examples that convey her investment in the recuperation and interrogation of South African history.
Since the coming of democracy in 1994, in works such as Truth Games, Can’t Forget, Can't Remember, Messages from the Moat, and Better Lives, Williamson has continued to focus on such issues as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, slavery, and immigration.
In No More Fairy Tales, a series of five two-channel video conversations highlights the reality of daily life in South Africa twenty years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was embarked upon as a process which many hoped then would bring healing to the stricken country. In mid 2015, with student unrest that swept across the country it became clear that the wounds had not healed. One of the first completed videos - It's a pleasure to meet you - follows a conversation between two young people in their twenties - Candice Mama and Siyah Mgoduka - whose fathers were killed by apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock.
In One Hundred and Nineteen Deeds of Sale, the names given by slave masters, ages, sexes, and places of birth, along with the names of buyers and sellers, prices paid, and the date of purchase of people from the slave trade in India are written in black ink on cotton shirts. The shirts are imported from India, dipped into muddy waters drawn from the Cape Coast Castle, and hung around the grounds until Heritage Day, September 24, 2019. They are then taken down and returned to India, where they are washed clean and rehung as an installation at the Aspinwall House in Kochi. These people were transported by Dutch East India Company to work at the Cape Town Castle and the Company's Gardens. Williamson incorporates the history and memory of the slave trade in order to transform the stigmatizing history into a history that can address and combat global inequalities. Upon opening the exhibition, WIlliamson read extracts of historical accounts while a woman picked up each shirt, read out the information on it, and then took it inside to be dipped in mud and hung on a washing line. The installation tells a story of loss and symbolizes the essence of a person that is floating in the wind, but all that remains is their memory.
Williamson's ethical lens has expanded in more recent years to consider social issues on a more global scale, as in her work 'Other Voices, Other Cities'', from 2009.

Public collections

Williamson's work is in the collection of a variety of museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of African Art - Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Williamson has also participated in group exhibitions including The Short Century, Liberated Voices, the Johannesburg Art Biennale, the Havana Biennale, and the Venice Biennale.

Selected exhibitions

In 1997 Sue Williamson established ArtThrob, a prominent online publication that features the work of contemporary South African artists. ArtThrob has been nominated three times as a finalist for the Arts and Culture Trust Award, and in 1999 was nominated for the United Nations for best cultural website.
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