Jonathan Cane

Het Versamel (Mixed media installation, Size variable)

Artist's Statement

The installation, Het Versamel, examines the post-apartheid practices of institutional memorialising and active, public un-remembering. The impetus for this project was my discovery that the busts of Verwoerd, having been loaded onto flatbed trucks in 1994, were now stored in Pretoria and Orania archives, consigned to unrepresentability. It seemed to me that it was the very impossibility of making or seeing his portrait that gestured towards making portraits from sites of absence; places previously named after him: hospitals, office blocks, dams, airports, primary schools, suburbs. He cannot be remembered, except underground, in fluorescent-lit storerooms, watched over by diligent white-coated ladies.

Artist's Biography

Born: Johannesburg, 1978. Lives and works in Johannesburg. Received his Honours Degree in African Studies from the University of Cape Town and is currently completing his MA in History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Major exhibitions: Spier Contemporary 2007/08.

• Announcing the Audience Choice Award
• Zim Ngqawana and Kyle Shepherd do Vandalizim at Spier Contemporary
• Getting the best from the Exhibition