Curatorial Intensive alumna Evelyn Owen and Yaëlle Biro, co-curators of the exhibition The Aftermath of Conflict: Jo Ractliffe's Photographs of Angola and South Africa, will discuss photographer Jo Ractliffe's practice.
Throughout her career, South African photographer Jo Ractliffe (born 1961) has directed her camera toward landscapes to address themes of displacement, conflict, history, memory, and erasure. The exhibition The Aftermath of Conflict: Jo Ractliffe's Photographs of Angola and South Africa, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings together selected works from three of Ractliffe’s recent photographic series that focus on the aftermath of the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002) and its relationship with the Border War (1966–89) fought by South Africans in Angola and present-day Namibia.
For Ractliffe and many other South African civilians, Angola during these wars was an abstract place, a "secret, unspoken location where brothers and boyfriends were sent as part of their military service." In this presentation at the ICI Curatorial Hub, the exhibition's co-curators, Yaëlle Biro and Evelyn Owen, will discuss the origins and development of the exhibition, the works on view, and the artist’s attempts to "retrieve a place for memory" through her deepening engagement with the region's complex histories.
This event is free and open to the public. To attend, please RSVP to rsvp@curatorsintl.org with JO in the subject line.
