Garth Erasmus
Garth Erasmus (South Africa)
Garth Erasmus is a visual artist and musician. His work focuses on South African socio-cultural politics as it relates to KhoiSan (South Africa's First Nation people) identity. Garth work uses archival research to approach his Khosian lineage, and drawing on figures from Khosian cosmology.
Erasmus has employed Afrikaans text to comment on the brutal Khosian history and its impact on present descendants, opening a window onto the way this history has been repressed. He has been featured in almost every major book survey of South African art since the late 1980s, and is well represented in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute.
Cape Resoundings (collaborative exhibition)
Sound is an archeological and navigational tool for exploring the richly complicated terrain of South African history for artists Garth Erasmus and Siemon Allen. Through their work in “ReSoundings,” visitors enter a world of South African chronologies and heritage deeply rooted and specific yet resonant beyond national borders.
Garth's work reminds viewers that South African history did not begin with apartheid or even with the entry of the Dutch into the Cape Colony, now Cape Town, in April of 1652. Rather, its cultural, linguistic, creative and artistic legacies are as old as humankind.
Since the 1980s, Erasmus has been deeply invested in the life and cultural heritage of South Africa’s indigenous inhabitants, among them Sara Baartman and Autshumato. Their histories inspire Erasmus’ sound art, seen and heard in the exhibition.
Allen’s installation is inspired by his ongoing analysis of the beloved Afrikaans folk song, Daar Kom Die Alibama (There Comes the Alabama). Albeit contested, its purported namesake is the eponymous Confederate raider, CSS Alabama, which docked in the Cape in 1863 and 1864. Allen brings visual order to interrelated histories and conflated trajectories that include South Africa’s maritime and colonial histories, the American Civil War and the transatlantic slave trade.
