White wagons – Pippa Skotnes

‘In the wake of the white wagons’ was the title of Pippa Skotnes’s exhibition for the Standard Bank Young Artist Award – an annual award made to a young South African artist. It opened at the Grahamstown Festival in June 1993 and travelled to Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg, Newcastle, Durban, Kimberley, Pretoria and finally, in July 1994, to the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. The focus of the exhibition was, once again, the Bleek and Lloyd archive, and included Sound from the thinking strings and several new artists’ books, prints (including eight large-scale multi-plate etchings which interpreted visually the lives of several individual |xam people) and the ‘White wagons’ portfolio. One of the artists’ books, Heaven’s things, was later published in the Llarec Series in Visual History.

The exhibition tried to reveal the visual as a site of knowledge and as an agent for the publication of research. Michael Godby, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Cape Town, wrote the catalogue essay and the show was widely reviewed. Several of the works were later exhibited in Europe and the United States and were purchased by a number of public and private collections. The exhibitions gave further exposure to the Bleek and Lloyd archive and the intellectual traditions of the |xam.