Back to the future

Alex Dodd

In early May, I took a flight from Johannesburg to London, and caught a train at Victoria Station travelling north-east to Norfolk. I sipped on a Costa cappuccino to ward off the haunting luminosity of my 2.30am stopover in Dubai, as rain clouds hovered wimpishly over the green spring fields and diligent post-industrial towns of England. From medieval days through to the Industrial Revolution, Norwich was regarded as England's second city, and its ancient cobbled streets remain culturally charged.

I've always known it as the home of the world-renowned creative writing programme founded by Sir Malcolm Bradbury and Sir Angus Wilson in 1970, which counts among its alumni Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Erica Wagner and Adam Foulds. In May 2012, Norwich was designated as England's first UNESCO City of Literature.

The city was also the adopted home of the German writer WG Sebald, who before his death in a car crash in 2001 at the age of 57, was cited by literary critics as one of the greatest living authors and a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sebald's book Rings of Saturn is about his meditative, meandering trek through the East Anglian landscape. 'Suffolk becomes a sort of palimpsest for his eloquent, precise, lugubrious, often drily witty meditations about war, death, destruction and decay, about memories and continuities and the feeling that nothing entirely disappears,' writes The Observer's Phillip French.

Before I left home, I read a characteristically peripatetic piece by Nigerian-born New-York based writer Teju Cole about a trip he took to visit Sebald's grave in St Andrew's churchyard in Framingham Earl, close to where the great drift writer lived (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/07/a-visit-to-w-g-sebalds-grave.html). I dreamed of doing a similar pilgrimage, but realised even before leaving antsy pre-elections Cape Town that, with the rand:pound exchange rate at 18:1, I probably wouldn't be able to afford the taxi.

Just as well I was there for another purpose, of which Sebald might well have approved, being so irrevocably drawn, as he was, to the mysterious workings of the past in the present. I was there to present a paper at the 'At Work in the Archive' conference at the School of Art History and World Art Studies at the Sainsbury Institute for Art at the University of East Anglia, and looked forward to some days of conceptual flight in the airy hangar-like Norman Foster building in which the institute is housed.

Like Cologne, Dresden and Hamburg, about which Sebald writes in his stirring call against national amnesia, On the Natural History of Destruction (1999), Norwich was ravaged by a sustained bombing campaign during World War II, but was resurrected with some bold instances of 20^th-century architectural futurity, making it a place where the past and the present contend for one's attention in powerful alternating currents. This made it an inherently catalytic place in which to host a conference that grappled directly with contemporary artists' attempts to dig out, rethink, and in some instances rescript violently suppressed or mercilessly skewed aspects of colonial history through a range of lateral archival engagements and radical counter-archival strategies.

'Contemporary art has an intense interest in the archive, both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. This "archival impulse", as Hal Foster called it, raises questions regarding the powerful (mal)functions of the archive in our project of modernity and goes beyond any narrow disciplinary interest,' reads the conference's call for papers.

The conference was part of an umbrella project called Utopian Archives: Excavating Pasts for Postcolonial Futures. Funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, this research network is led by Dr Ferdinand de Jong (University of East Anglia), Dr Paul Basu (University College London) and Professor David Murphy (University of Stirling).

'We aim to examine how artists have engaged with the archive in order to explore decolonial futures,' wrote De Jong and his co-convenor, Rania Jaber. 'This problematic, to be timely, should be situated in a context of postcolonial fatigue. Whilst early liberation ideologies are being recycled, many postcolonial subjects have abandoned the postcolonial project and have resigned themselves to what the anthropologist Charles Piot has termed "nostalgia for the future". In this context a new impulse to rethink decolonial futures is required. Such an impulse may be found in the archival work of those artists whose critique of the archive yields a decolonial subjectivity. Addressing the archive as medium, postcolonial artists work through its materiality in order to rethink the temporality of the postcolony. They are "at work in the archive".'

True to its focus on 'decolonial futures', the conference had a strong South African presence, both in terms of presenters and topics explored. As I stepped out of the light spring drizzle and climbed aboard the taxi parked outside of the Maid's Head Hotel (the oldest hotel in the UK, dating back 800 years) on Day One, I was pleased to encounter my fellow APC researcher Brenton Maart, who has recently taken up his new position as Director of the AVA Gallery, Cape Town's oldest non-profit, members based, public benefit organisation and art gallery.

Drawing on his experience as curator of the exhibition, Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive, for the South African Pavilion at the 55^th Biennale di Venezia, Maart presented his paper as part of a panel on 'Recuperations and Re-appropriations'. In the first instance, he positioned the work of the artists on Imaginary Fact within five conceptual frameworks that emerged out of the conference, Archives of post-independent Africa and its Diaspora (Senegal, 2012): administering the archive, performing the archive, spatialisation of the archive, post-independence media formations, archival absences and surrogate collections of the African state.

In the second instance, he highlighted examples of a 'radical approach to creative archival practice that extends on the traditional method of using available archival fragments (what is there) to fill the gaps (what is not there)'. He argued that the imaginative practice of 'fictional documentary', which merges the documentary (evidence) with fictional construction (invention), is what 'drives creative archival practice in South Africa today'.

Part of the same panel was Zamansele Nsele, of Rhodes University, who delivered a finely wrought paper on the vexing question of 'nostalgia' in the post-apartheid context, with reference to works by Andrew Putter, Stephen Cohen, Kara Walker, Ayana v Jackson and Shigeyuki Kihara, and drawing on thinkers ranging from Hal Foster and Svetlana Boym, to Jacob Dlamini. 'The implications of nostalgia a "post-apartheid" context may be viewed as contentious if not absurd considering the brutality of a colonial and "apartheid past",' she argued, 'However, the notion of nostalgia serves an effective conceptual tool for identifying desires, pleasures and fetishes that certain representation may or may not gratify in the "post-apartheid" moment. Nostalgia is a complex phenomenon that facilitates the understanding of time in non-linear ways (Boym, 2001).'

I opened the first session on 'the body as document' with a paper arising out of my recently submitted PhD thesis, Secular Séance: Post-Victorian embodiment in contemporary South African art. In it, I explore selected bodies of work by five contemporary South African artists that resuscitate nineteenth-century aesthetic tropes in ways that productively reimagine South Africa's traumatic colonial inheritance. I investigate the aesthetic strategies and thematic concerns employed by Mary Sibande, Nicholas Hlobo, Mwenya Kabwe, Kathryn Smith and Santu Mofokeng, and argue that the common tactic of engagement is a focus on the body as the prime site of cognition and 'the aesthetic as a form of embodiment, mode of being-in-the-world' (Merleau-Ponty 123). It is by means of the body that the divisive colonial fictions around race and gender were intimately inscribed and it is by means of the body, in all its performative and sensual capacities, that they are currently being symbolically undone and re-scripted.

One of the other presenters in my session, Jessica Schons, from the Catholic University of Louvain, delivered a paper on her research into the work of Cape Town-based artist Hentie van der Merwe, illustrating the ways in which the construct of 'whiteness' has been addressed in his work. Through the use of a hidden archives, like Hugh McFarlane's homoerotic photographs, used in Untitled (1997), Van der Merwe investigates how South African archives have constructed particular aspects of the concept of whiteness through the male body and a stereotyped notion of masculinity.

Questions of typology and seriality came to the fore in Schon's paper, so it was interesting to read, only a few weeks later, that The Walther Collection will be hosting an exhibition at Les Rencontres d'Arles, one of the world's leading photography festivals, from July to September, titled Typology, Taxonomy and Seriality, bringing together artists from Europe, Africa, China, Japan and North America. The artists included in the exhibition, curated by Brian Wallis, 'cover a wide time frame, from Eadweard Muybridge's "Animal Locomotion" studies in the 1880s, to early Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") photographers Karl Blossfeldt and August Sander, to contemporary photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki and Ai Weiwei. Several South African artists will feature. Typology, Taxonomy and Seriality is the first in a two-part series of exhibitions from The Walther Collection in France. The second part is to be organized by la maison rouge, Paris, in October 2015.

Other conference papers focused on African art with an archival bent included a provocative and engaging paper on 'remix and iconoclasm as aesthethic practice in contemporary art in Angola' by Nadine Siegert of Iwalewa-Haus, Africa Centre of the University of Bayreuth, and two equally lyrical and searching papers on works by William Kentridge - Angela Breidbach of the Hochschule fur Bildende Künste, Hamburg, on Refusal of Time, and Ferdinand de Jong, our host at the University of East Anglia, on Black Box.

I was greatly impressed by how focused and 'on topic' all the papers were. Each presentation solidly held my full attention, not just at the level of facticity and conceptual rigour, but at the more poetic and visual levels too - a rare thing that.