Goodman Gallery presents ‘in situ’, a group exhibition that brings together the work of David Goldblatt, Jabulani Dhlamini, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Ruth Motau and Nicola Brandt, each offering a unique lens on architecture as both a vessel and residue of the cultural, political and social forces shaping our environments. By reimagining the built world not merely as physical spaces but as complex storied landscapes, the exhibition examines how structures embody and influence the ideologies and histories that define them. ‘in situ’ opened on the 20th of November 2024 and will run until the 28th of January 2025 at Oude Leeskamer Stellenbosch.
47 x 37.6 cm, Image courtesy of Goodman Gallery.
David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, he chronicled the people, structures and landscapes of his country from 1948, through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era until his death in June 2018. In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. In general, Goldblatt’s subject matter spanned the whole of South Africa geographically and politically from sweeping landscapes of the Karoo desert, to the strenuous commutes of migrant black workers, forced to live in racially segregated areas. His broadest series, which spans six decades of photography, examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the physical and ideological structures that they have built.
Jabulani Dhlamini (b. 1983, Warden, South Africa) is a documentary photographer whose practice reflects on his upbringing in the post-apartheid era alongside the experiences of local South African communities. Dhlamini’s most celebrated bodies of work have focused on key moments in South African history, such as ‘Recaptured’ which looks at cross-generational recollections of the Sharpeville Massacre; ‘Isisekelo’ which documents the familial impact of land dispossession; as well as ‘iQhawekazi’, which mapped the shifting legacy of anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at the time of her death in 2018.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa is a South African photographer born in in 1995 in Katlehong, Johannesburg. He was introduced to photography in 2012 through the Of Soul and Joy Project in Buhlebuzile High School in Thokoza township, where his photography mentors included Bieke Depoorter, Cyprien Clément-Delmas, Thabiso Sekgala, Tjorven Bruyneel and Kutlwano Moagi. In 2013 Sobekwa joined Live Magazine as a part-time photographer in 2013. In subsequent years he exhibited work at Kalashnikovv Gallery in South Africa and with No Man’s Art Gallery in the Netherlands and in their pop-up exhibitions in South Africa, Iran and Norway. In the past year his work has been shown internationally at Paris Photo by both Goodman Gallery and Magnin-A gallery.
