Candyland, a Masters Fine Art Photography exhibition, opened on Wednesday 19 November at the Albany National History Museum’s Standard Bank Gallery in Grahamstown.
Candyland, a Masters Fine Art Photography exhibition, opened on Wednesday 19 November at the Albany National History Museum’s Standard Bank Gallery in Grahamstown.
Through a series of carefully constructed photographic images, Russell Bruns confronts and explores his own position and social ‘standing’ as a privileged white South African.
While it is widely acknowledged that South Africa remains deeply divided along class and racial lines, the social complexities and manifestations of this remain largely uninterrogated.
Bruns’ work explores how race and class affect the formation of South African subjectivity and the complexities of social relations in the present, looking particularly at the education system.
Candyland aims to defamiliarise the physical and ideological structures from the past that are still operating in the present.
“Because of routine, these structures have entered the everyday – the familiar. This normalises them – we’re blind to them,” explained Bruns.
Bruns’ critical approach to his context is informed by Victor Shklovsky, the Marxist author who coined the term ‘defamiliarisation,’ as well as author Walter Benjamin.
In acknowledging that all photos are constructed, Bruns began photographing in a reflective, reconstructive manner, using actors to recreate scenes.
“It [construction]happens as soon as you frame something – there’s always an agenda,” he said.
Moving away from a typical photo series, Candyland is a collection of stand-alone images.
Just as each image is constructed, so too is the narrative structure of the exhibition space.
On entry, the viewer’s expectations are met.
Photographs display Bruns’ personal take on the student life at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and the surrounding Eastern Cape.
As one walks along, “blindness is revealed,” said Bruns.
Turning the corner, the viewer is confronted by these underlying societal structures in a most unusual way.
An ant hill up in flames, burning from the inside out provides an eerie departure from the familiar photographs in the first part of the exhibition.
“Ant-colonies are eusocial – the highest level of organisation of animal sociality,” said Bruns, explaining this image and its relevance to his context and exhibition as a whole.
The ideal is depicted with a dark twist.
Other photographs in the exhibition incorporating material objects and modern tools of convenience serve to illustrate and defamiliarise what we choose to be absorbed by.
“This is a mean of blindness,” said Bruns, choosing to see convenience above structural constraints.
Alongside the photographs are four videos, titled by the accumulated likes on Facebook statues featured in the videos.
“The videos show what the photos can’t,” said Bruns.
They further question how these ideological structures have permeated time and space.
The familiar voice of the ‘Dial 1026’ lady can be heard in the beginning of the videos. This addresses the present moment, yet speaks so clearly of the past. A function that originated 25 years ago as a means of time-checking – an age-old structure still in place.
Actors in the videos converse by means of reciting Facebook statuses.
This addresses the artist’s ‘everyday.’
The banality of the statuses, which have become ‘everyday’ now, is both humorous and concerning.
