"Terry Kurgan: Skip"
2003-05-21 until 2003-06-14
Bell-Roberts Art Gallery
Cape Town, , ZA South Africa

Kurgan’s work over the last number of years has been characterised by two over-riding concerns. Firstly her interest in the complex relationship of domestic and family photography to personal and cultural identity and memory, and secondly her engagement with and commitment to public realm/public space projects and collaborative practise.  

For this exhibition she brings together a re-presentation of her Joubert Park Public Art Project mobile photo studio with a new video installation Skip, made with her daughter Jessie, and presents them as one work. Projected onto a series of silk screens, Skip makes an elegant reference to Kurgan’s award winning piece Lost & Found  ( FNB Vita Prize 2000).

Kathryn Smith writes:

 " With this exhibition Skip Kurgan constructs a circuit of visual and conceptual  interrelationships that reflect a working methodology/ethos that is self-consciously and critically engaged in the space between public projects and private work  … Her work with the photographic image, whether family images or in consultation with the Joubert Park photographers, renegotiates these visual records that always seem to simultaneously evoke both presence and absence, life and death, love and loss, either through capturing the image of another, or choosing how we should represent ourselves in a portrait. Likewise, the slippage or skipping across private and public, also brings to the fore the dual action of the photograph: the act of recording and the act of looking, both of which manifest differently, yet equally importantly in both realms. Or rather, qualities of the public resound in the private and vice versa.  In trying to articulate this discontinuity through the metaphor of skipping, Kurgan succeeds in eloquently articulating the productive space between."

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for South Africa

Other Important Exhibitions in South Africa