The years preceding South Africa’s first free vote in 1994, which saw Nelson Mandela elected president, were disheartening and at times brutal.
Rather than capturing front-page acts of violence under the legalized racism known as apartheid, however, Ractliffe (South African, born 1961) found her creative voice by working indirectly—through allegories and aftermath. Ractliffe offered symbolic depictions of human character in pictures of common animals, particularly donkeys and dogs, as in her 1987 series of photolithographs Nadir (“the low point”): stray curs roaming or leaping in a postapocalyptic landscape. In other early landscape photographs, she showed what remained after neighborhoods and townships for people of color were razed in favor of the white minority.
Crossroads, 1986
© Jo Ractliffe. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
This exhibition—the first survey ever organized of Ractliffe’s work—brings together more than 100 artworks from across her career. These include dreamlike photographs the artist made in the 1990s with one-dollar cameras while cruising the port city of Durban and on a cross-country road trip, as well as a second highway piece, the unsettling installation N1 Incident/End of Time (1997/99). Large-scale color prints, video installations, and documentary photographs made from around 2000 to as recently as 2018 round out this comprehensive look at the artist’s varied and haunting body of work.
Landscapes of South Africa
Ractliffe’s haunting images depict the country in the aftermath of apartheid.
Seabirds, Cape Point, from the series Signs of Life, 2018
Collection of Cecily Cameron and Derek Schrier. © Jo Ractliffe. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
verge, from the series reShooting Diana, 1990–95, portfolio printed 2004
© Jo Ractliffe. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
Raising the flag, Riemvasmaak, from the series The Borderlands, 2013
© Jo Ractliffe. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
West Coast, 1987
© Jo Ractliffe. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
The Brave Ones, from the series Signs of Life, 1995
Artworkers Retirement Society. © Jo Ractliffe. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
A Peek inside the Exhibition
Jo Ractliffe’s photographs are presented in two separate exhibition spaces, Gallery 188 through May 23, 2021, and Galleries 1–4 through August 9, 2021.
Galleries 1–4
Gallery 188
Sponsors
Major support for Jo Ractliffe: DRIVES is provided by Cecily Cameron and Derek Schrier and Hilary and Gidon Cohen.
Additional funding is contributed by Gary Metzner and Scott Johnson.
