‘Another Country’ investigates the legacy of Apartheid South Africa, drawing on a collection of photographic media to produce a body of work concerned with memory and history. This digital archive contains film stills and media images, typically of poor or degraded quality, which document disconnected threads of South African history.  

The project deliberately uses images whose specific political, cultural, or sentimental meaning remains ambiguous. The digitized nature of the source material and resulting degradation of image quality subverts the paintings’ representational function; edges are blurred, layers of paint dissolve into pattern, and images are cropped to deliberately conceal information.

The material outcomes question the inaccessibility of lesser-known parts of South African history, the inaccessibility of my personal relationship to the source material, and the ability (or inability) of representational painting to reckon with the cultural hangover of Apartheid.

Install photo credit: Bo Wong