ArtThrob Jan 1999
‘eye Africa: African Photography 1840-1998’
By Rob Meintjes (photographer and journalism lecturer)
[Extract]
Revue Noire’s ‘eye Africa’, the most comprehensive collection of sub-Saharan photography ever to be exhibited on this continent…
The exhibition offers a fascinating cross-section of work spanning the years 1840 to 1998, ranging from the regal portraits of Senegalese master photographers Mama Casset and Meissa Gaye to the experimental work of South Africa’s Julia Tiffin…Julia Tiffin’s ‘Blindfold 1’ at the Joåo Ferreira Gallery. Tiffin attempts to take her portraits past the actual to the psychic by manipulating her images in the darkroom to create a sense of movement, splitting the portraits, or pasting strips of paper over sections so the subject appears to us as partially screened. In Beyond the Veil: Portrait of Jo-ann, wife, mother the eyes of the subject seem at first glance to be cast down, but on closer examination one sees that the eyes are covered by a second, milkily negative pair. Thus the gaze is rendered ambivalent, half-hidden, a bit like those pictures of Christ in which the eyes open and close when you move your head. The mouth is tense. One imagines from the title that Jo-ann does not find being a wife and mother easy. Tiffin’s investigations are interesting.
Mail & Guardian 5 Feb 1999
by Sue Williamson (international artist & curator)
[Extract]
…. EyeAfrica comes to Cape Town from the Musee de l’Art Moderne in Paris via the Sao Paulo Biennale, part of it has gone to the Barbican in London, where a selection of the work is being shown, and then it all travels to the National Museum of African Art in Washington…
… Here are the relentless photographs of David Goldblatt, a photographer whose searing black and white images of the people and structures of our country cut to the bone. Here are the deceased Billy Monk’s ribald records of the denizens of Cape Town’s low-life clubland in the Fifties, Penny Siopis’s colour photographs of museum detritus about Saartjie Baartman, mysteriously lit rituals against painted rockfaces from Santu Mofokeng.
Experimenting with images in the darkroom, Julia Tiffin allows the surface of her close-up photographs of flesh to blister, before rephotographing the result, giving a surreal representation of physical pain. Here, too, is the country through the eyes of Obie Oberholzer, Zwelethu Mthetwa, Guy Tillim, Chris Ledochowski and Cape Argus photographer Willie de Klerk , to name but a few.
So mesmerizing are the images, so rich, it is all too much to take in a single visit.
ArtThrob April 2002
Julia Tiffin – ‘Buried Alive’ at João Ferreira Gallery
by Nikki Winward Cross
On entering Julia Tiffin’s photographic installation ‘Buried Alive’, the viewer is enveloped by an “earthy pine smell … reminiscent of the womb: inviting a space of beginnings, a place of safe exploration”. Or so one is informed by the artist’s statement. On arriving at the exhibition all that is left to arouse the olfactory senses is a couple of strategically placed plastic sacks filled with dried up soil and dead pine needles. Nonetheless, Tiffin’s highly complex, multi-referential exploration plotting a personal “processing” of “genetic and inherited memory” manages to withstand the lack of this sensory element.
More intriguing than the absent “memory-jolting” aromas are the large-scale, uniformly framed images positioned at regular intervals throughout the space. Comprising two separate yet thematically resonant series, these images document what Tiffin refers to as a “choreographed performance in which real moments and things are cycled through a succession of narrative passages”.
The images spanning the left-hand side of the gallery space depict a television set at various stages of interment. Small Perspex calendar “pages” on which the artist has recorded the phases of this process accompany each image, functioning as clues to deciphering the significance of the burial procedure. These dates and comments alert the viewer to the fact that the television set is an inherited object, and in turn to its significance as an embodiment of personal and “genetic” memory. As a signifier of the intangible yet “weighty burden” of memory, the physical enactment of burying the inherited relic represents a metaphoric processing of these “potentially suffocating” memories. The unexpected vandalization of the burial site, which is documented as part of the “narrative”, comes to represent for Tiffin an actual liberation of this inherited memory.
In the second set of images, Tiffin explores a similar metaphoric process. Different from their high-resolution counterparts in their diffuse, almost sensual depiction of a glass container placed upon the seashore with waves washing around it, these images nevertheless continue the physical process of grappling with memory. Described by Tiffin as a container for that which cannot be “seen, heard or touched”; “memories fragile and pernicious”, the “destruction” of this glass vessel as it is swept away by the force of the ocean in yet another unexpected incident comes again to symbolise a liberation or release from the burden of memory.
While the title ‘Buried Alive’ suggests, among other associations, finality of experience and closure, the manner in which Tiffin has arranged the images – with the last of the glass box series being the first image one looks at before moving into the “narrative” of the television set, itself introduced by the image of a new “functional and stylistically modern” set projected onto the wall tiles above a bath, comes to suggest a ceaseless, cyclical process, undoubtedly referring to the regenerative processes of birth/death. Indeed, Tiffin writes that “conceptually ‘Buried Alive’ draws from the metaphor of the seed”, something which requires burial in order to germinate. In this way, the grave becomes a symbol of the womb, a fecund regenerative space, while the water lapping around the glass container is reminiscent of amniotic fluid.
On closer inspection, it becomes evident that these images do not form a sequential narrative as one is led to believe. In following the dates provided by the Perspex calendars one comes to realise that Tiffin has, in a manner of speaking, “fictionalised” the apparent narrative, in the process emulating and highlighting the selective and fictionalising actuality of memory. This ethereal mutability inherent in the nature of memory is again referenced in Tiffin’s use of photography to document this reclamatory and regenerative process. Tiffin writes about the photograph as a “matrix of secret storytelling that turns fiction into fact and back again”, a process that she feels is analogous to remembering. For Tiffin, in documenting an intrinsically personal experience, these photographic images both rewrite and recreate the truth of past events, in the process initiating new truths and new narratives in a manner that simulates the myth-making processes of memory.
Lifting the Veil I Dungeons at The Castle Iziko Museum, Cape Town, Month of Photography 2005
A review by Kevin McCauley, MFA, Los Angelos
A Flashing of Ordinary Moments
I’m irritated with myself.
I have this persistent tendency to let others do my looking for me and I’ve been caught at it again. A world of images made me do it and an image-maker named Julia Tiffin caught me out. It seems artists really can put us right sometimes.
But just look at what our culture is up to. Walk Sea Point Main Rd, Cape Town or check the TV. Surf the net for a while and then tell me: does that hysterical spectacle of riotous color flash its skin at your request?
Personally, I didn’t ask for any of it. But the clamor of things that want me to want them is relentless. It’s hard to ignore. So I lease out my looking for free and carry on saying I see for myself. Hawking my wares where it’s easy seems cheap, I know, but I’m only one of the numberless kids raised in the age of global commotion. We acquired the skill to relinquish our sight while we practiced our one two threes. Surrender is our second nature.
And easy as A, B, C. Sit still, do nothing, wait for it – banter exuberant hue grabs your attention, gets you going in the groin and you feel like all that you need is just what they’ve got. Everything is bright and hip and smart and quick in our flashing and buzzing neon NOW. Once I was the agent of my own seeing. But somewhere on my way here from kidhood my eyes got hooked on sweets. They got cannibalized, Vegas-style.
When every turn hides another blaring sensory ambush, the mundane becomes refuge. So give me something ordinary. I want a place that does not shout. Give me the off-whites of poolside cement – I want skinned knees and bleaching summer light. An exceptional family snapshot would do well, but I’ll take any given minute of an everyday place.
Julia Tiffin would give us that minute. She seems to want to help. She gets us out of the range of the rapacious din we’ve raised for a pause and an exile. She won’t send her photograph after us. They’re objects for sale, of course, but they don’t make demands. They don’t document or fantasize or expose, or do any of the usual jobs photos do. They’re phrases from conversations she still hasn’t finished. And pieces of puzzles she’s worked on for years.
We can listen or not – it’s our choice. But lend her your attention and Tiffin uncovers secrets: places that seem quiet because they don’t shout still speak. Listen well – a quarry of ancient shale could murmur your own story to you. Look closely – a loamy trickle of rain in an old stone corridor might have something to show. It could mirror you clearly.
The full spectrum of atmospheric radiation is too much for us humans. Our eyes catch a little at a time – and still we struggle to manage even that thin blade of light. We need our filters. We’re fond of our veils and we wear them in a brilliant array. They can be mournful or soulful or playful and coy. They can hide or reveal us, protect or oppress us. They’re mysterious, alluring. Sexy and trashy. On occasion they’re holy. But whatever its particular tone, the swathe over our eyes is woven of our own design. We let some things in, we keep others out.
The photographs offered by Julia Tiffin’s Lifting the Veil clock the passage of subjective time – in a tic mark or scrawled notation, each life by its own measure. This project kept Tiffin in intimate conversation with her subjects – it drew each closer to her in some way – and in meditative dialog with herself. As a public expression, Lifting the Veil reveals the photographer’s programme as something far past portraiture. Tiffin uses her lens to assist us in measuring out some of the dimensions of our lives – where we have been, what we have witnessed, how long we’ve been waiting. For my part, I’d ask for an accurate gauge of how clearly I see myself. Of all that I could possibly know by now, how much do I have in focus? What remains obscured?
If this artist has her way, Lifting the Veil will remind us of how common we all are. Our entry into the world was not a fabulous affair; it was not attended by triumphant light and sound. It was the usual, beautiful mess. And it was only the first in a slideshow of ordinary moments that would amount to a singular life. Tiffin’s art calculates these trajectories in the making of selves: how, in the flicker of the every day and the commonplace we hear ourselves speaking and see ourselves looking – and we shift the range of light.
PhotoSynthesis
South African National Gallery (SANG), ed. Kathy Grundlingh, 1996
Avoiding the event by Jane Taylor, University of the Western Cape, pg 6
[Extract]
Over the past two decades, South African photography has been marked by its content. We were living in extraordinary times, and the camera documented this, our monumental history. Since 1994, however, South African arts generally have been reinventing themselves, trying to find new visual languages, engaging new questions. What’s has become apparent, upon examining the range of materials submitted for this show, is how photography has been through a profound shift… The weight of the image was its apparently unmediated content. This convention is undergoing significant revision…
Julia Tiffin, for example, manipulates the photographic surface itself with acids and water, burning and blistering the skin of the emulsion. This ‘decay’, as she terms it, is integral to the work’s final meanings.
Mature A Penser I Photographies Corporelles
Artothèque du Département de La Réunion, ed. Caroline de Fondaumière, 2002
[Extract]
Picture grain and texture
A dull pain runs through Julia TIFFIN’s photos she works out by mixing matters made of acid and jelly that turn into a bloated eruptive skin full of bumps and holes.
The film is marked, burnt. The picture grain blurs into the skin texture. Violent black and white effects softened by tones of grey brings us all of a sudden into the South African political and social scene whose harsh racist discourse has marked the flesh of several generations of black and white men and women.
Skin becomes a land where people’s thoughts are expressed and imprinted. The artists obsessive fear of death is engraved into it. The injury, open wound on the smooth spotless skin of a naked body reflects eroticism like a violation of the human being in the very depth of his intimacy. Everything seems to proceed from an ardent wish to root out from the body its truth, secret, in a spirit very close to that which drove artists thought the history of western painting by recalling the mysterious and precious aspect of life in the very heart of brutal scenes of tortured saints, crucified Christ and autopsied corpses.
This violent wrench and underlying eroticism border on the sacred, the incandescent desire for inner unification and harmonisation of conflicting opposites.
In that sequence “Skin”, the mind forms one body with the image and sticks to the photographic film which blurs into the skin of the artist.