Jo Ractliffe

For three decades, Jo Ractliffe’s photographs have reflected her ongoing preoccupation with the South African landscape and the ways in which it figures in the country’s imaginary – particularly, the violent legacies of apartheid. Since 2007 her work has focused on the aftermath of the war in Angola, a conflict South Africa was intricately involved in. Following Terreno Ocupado (2008) and As Terras do Fim do Mundo (2010), her recent work, The Borderlands (2013), looks at spaces within South Africa that were caught up in the mobilisation and aftermath of that war. Ractliffe is the Senior Lecturer in Photography at Wits University in Johannesburg and has taught at various local and international institutions including the Market Photo Workshop. In 2010 she was a Writing Fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) and in 2013 was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town. Recent exhibitions include: The Aftermath of Conflict: Jo Ractliffe’s Photographs of Angola and South Africa, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015); Time, Conflict, Photography, Tate Modern (2014); Someone Else’s Country, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (2014); Apartheid and After, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2014); The Borderlands, Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2013); Present Tense, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2013); Making History, Museum Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2012); Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, International Centre of Photography, New York (2012); Topographies de la Guerre, Le Bal, Paris (2011); Appropriated Landscapes, Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen (2011).