Association for Visual Arts | News From Elsewhere by Vincent Bezuidenhout

News From Elsewhere features a selection of images made during the artist's annual visits to the Mossel Bay area in South Africa. The exhibition comprises large-format colour photographic prints as well as a video installation, which consists of appropriated film footage.

The town of Mossel Bay is of historical importance in South Africa, from the landing of Portuguese explorer Bartholomeu Dias to revealing the earliest history of the nomadic Khoekhoe people, while Hartenbos was originally created by the Afrikaner Language and Culture Association as a white-only holiday resort during apartheid.

Bezuidenhout is known for his extensive bodies of work on the South African landscape as a political construct. In his latest work, he poses the question of whether the formal qualities of photography can be reinterpreted to propose a more nuanced rendering of the ‘landscape’ in South Africa.

The photographs are accompanied by a video installation consisting of appropriated film footage from the Afrikaans version of the Japanese animation series Heidi, Girl From the Alps (1974), released as Heidi van die Berge (1976). The work includes every landscape vista as it appeared in chronological order throughout all fifty-three episodes of the series. By anchoring the images within the context of a well-known animated series translated into Afrikaans during the height of Apartheid and perceived as an idealized depiction of the European landscape, he asks if the established discourse on landscape in South African art is still relevant or if it needs to be subverted for us to gain a new understanding.

This show runs from 15th October - 15th November 2024.