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Course: Global cultures 1980–now > Unit 1
Lesson 5: Apartheid-era South AfricaSue Williamson, For Thirty Years Next to His Heart
Google ClassroomVideo by The Museum of Modern Art
Sue Williamson, For Thirty Years Next to His Heart, 1990, Forty-nine photocopies in artist-designed frames, overall (approx.): 72 x 103″ (182.9 x 261.6 cm) (The Museum of Modern Art)
Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, the Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator of Painting and Sculpture, looks at Sue Williamson’s “For Thirty Years Next to His Heart,” in which the 30-year life of one man’s official government passbook “captures the experience of Black South Africans under apartheid”—and serves as a reminder that we must not forget the most difficult chapters of our history. Created by Smarthistory.
Sue Williamson, For Thirty Years Next to His Heart, 1990, Forty-nine photocopies in artist-designed frames, overall (approx.): 72 x 103″ (182.9 x 261.6 cm) (The Museum of Modern Art)
Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, the Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator of Painting and Sculpture, looks at Sue Williamson’s “For Thirty Years Next to His Heart,” in which the 30-year life of one man’s official government passbook “captures the experience of Black South Africans under apartheid”—and serves as a reminder that we must not forget the most difficult chapters of our history. Created by Smarthistory.
Video transcript
UGOCHUKWU-SMOOTH NZEWI: What
keeps me returning to this work-- in the passage of
time, we tend to forget dark pages of history--
and so what this work does is that it serves as
a historical reminder, not to forget difficult
moments that we've experienced in history. My name is
Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, I'm the Steven
and Lisa Tananbaum Curator in Painting
and Sculpture at MoMA. We are looking at this
incredible "Thirty Years Next to His Heart" by the South
African artist Sue Williamson. I spent a year in South Africa
in 2005, and in that time, I had the opportunity of meeting
the artist, Sue Williamson. And I got to know of
her incredible role in the anti-apartheid
movement, as an artist but also as a writer, and the way
in which her work was centered in capturing the sociopolitical
circumstances of apartheid. Williamson photocopied the
pages of a passbook that belonged to John Ngesi,
a dockworker, who carried this passbook for 30
years, close to his heart. Without this passbook,
Ngesi would not have been able to find
formal employment. And this, in a way,
captures the experiences of Black South Africans
under apartheid, a system of racial segregation
that started in 1948 and which ended in 1994
with the election of Nelson Mandela as the first president
of democratic South Africa. The work comprises of 49
panels arranged in a grid. We see the
quasi-cinematic narrative of a man's life unfold. In the first panel, it
shows a xeroxed photograph of Ngesi's fingers inserting,
the battered, weather-beaten passbook, and the interior
breast pocket of his overcoat. With that, we are
invited to look at this picture of intimacy of
this man's life for 30 years. This life continues to unravel
as you go through the panels. And then you see smudged
signatures and, of course, the bureaucratic stamps
of the apartheid system. The work concludes
with a signature of the artist, Sue Williamson,
and a stamp dated to 1990, the day the work was produced. And she continues to
return to the aftermaths and ramifications of apartheid
in present-day South Africa. What we see here is
the artist being-- being a witness of this
incredible personal history of Ngesi that intersects
with the collective memory of a very dark period in
South Africa's history.