| My work is informed by my experiences as a result of my mixed African heritage. I was classified “colored” under South African apartheid classification, but being fair-skinned, I was simultaneously labeled as “whitey” within this community. My work explores the confines of these narrow labels. I aim to reflect on and counter the systems and their legacies, such as imperialism, colonialism, and apartheid, which exert influence on African history, art, memory, and identity, and which reify identity and culture, rendering them homogenous and static. I show, instead, that they are shifting, contradictory, liminal, and diffusive. |
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Donovan Ward
My work is informed by my experiences as a result of my mixed African heritage. I was classified “colored” under South African apartheid classification, but being fair-skinned, I was simultaneously labeled as “whitey” within this community. My work explores the confines of these narrow labels.
I aim to reflect on and counter the systems and their legacies, such as imperialism, colonialism, and apartheid, which exert influence on African history, art, memory, and identity, and which reify identity and culture, rendering them homogenous and static. I show, instead, that they are shifting, contradictory, liminal, and diffusive. It is my intention to deconstruct “coherent,” idealized and sanitized narratives, and show how fragmentary constructions of history and identity, implicit in mass media and technology, offer a manufactured reality and the fictive materializes as fact—a space where Mickey Mouse has a presence and a voice, but real ones are silenced or marginalized.
A common thread in my work is the subversion of pre-existing iconic images. In contemporizing Saartjie Bartmann for instance, I am connecting cultures, hybridizing what is regarded as “pure.” Similarly, I aim to do this when I impose the faces of black women onto the figures of classical Greek sculptures. I think that what is upheld to be “sacred,” should be scrutinized, questioned, and examined. Hybridization and merging, which have traditionally been considered as tainting and diminishing, should be a recognition of the interconnectedness of humanity and culture.
I use materials that range from old, anonymous photographs found in secondhand shops, to images from history, art, popular culture, advertising, as well as graffiti from my neighborhood. In the process of production, I often mix “traditional” art materials with unconventional substances, like oil paint and pencil with dust and cement, and superimpose these over collage. My aim is for the materials to coexist in the work in a non-hierarchal manner. By fusing diverse media, ranging from the “precious” to the found object, and through fading and the layering of dust, I am again blurring their differences and highlighting their temporal nature. The accumulation of materials and images on the works, suggests a place where the narratives of the past together with those of the present, as illustrated by developments in technology, pop culture, and mass communication, may redefine memory and meaning, and which may therefore, reconfigure the present.
