Arts Thread

After Image: Echoes in Colour explores nostalgia and memory in relation to my experience as a second-generation South African in the Jewish diaspora. I reimagine my family archives through performative photography, silk-screen printing, video art, and colour selection. From the silence of previous diasporic generations emerges a vacuum in the archive. Much is left to the imagination in the interpretation of their personal experiences. My praxis emerges as an attempt to navigate the liminality intrinsic to a diasporic identity – an identity that is intertwined with the enigmatic histories and cultures of my ancestors, together with my contemporary experiences in modern-day South Africa. Based on oral stories, narratives, and family photographs, I create and enact my own version of certain family members and ancestors, playfully engaging with archetypes – such as that of conventional Jewish and Eastern European gendered dress codes of the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. I embody these archetypes as a means of relating to my ancestors’ experience of being Jewish in Eastern Europe and Germany. I question what is lost in oral retellings and bring myself into the understanding of these stories, reconstructing the idea of an individual through a deconstructive and anti-portrait approach. Silk-screen printing allows for the creation of a new form of documentation and image-making in which I combine and intertwine myself and my family’s history. Using my digitised archive and my own constructed photographs, I zoom in on specific moments that help form a narrative. This allows for pixelation, a loss of information, and abstraction when these zoomed-in moments become silk-screen prints. The boundaries between analogue and digital processes become blurred, resulting in a memory landscape where moments of combining different media become frames of parallel narratives. This body of work includes various video art pieces that engage in dialogue with the prints. I use Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to evoke a non-linear understanding of space and time, reimagining the relationship between the past and the future. Moreover, by utilising AI software to produce video art, I am separated from the outcome of my art-making, emphasising a sense of alienation intrinsic to the diasporic experience. Colour holds particular significance in my work. The careful selection of colours and their combinations for my silk-screen prints is a deliberate attempt to evoke a sense of softness, warmth and, at times, a subtle uneasiness. Some prints comprise unexpected or uncomfortable colour combinations, while others exude a gentle quality, reminiscent of nostalgia or childhood.