Zach Stewart

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

“Gotcha Nose”  

Inspired by the humourous and subversive act of severing Rhodes’ nose from his bust overlooking the city, my body of work seeks to mark, subvert, and unsettle whiteness in Cape Town suburbia. It is a series of anthropological observations of whiteness as I see it, expressed in myself and the spaces I inhabit – neighbourhood Whatsapp groups, schools, churches, and the university. This is my answer to George Yancy’s (2012) call to mark whiteness wherever I see it. In reverence for the Democratic Alliance; in idolatry of private security; in white flight to Australia. I have marked it by materializing it – turning it into strange souvenirs so that it might be gazed at and objectified with the type of attention it normally inflicts on the world. The hope is to unsettle it. Whiteness is strange and malicious. By turning it into souvenirs I want it to become visible to itself. Only once we recognize this strange malice do we have hope of becoming better humans in this city.