"Cuttings 1820 – 2020" exhibition

Cuttings 1820 – 2020, is a collaborative exhibition by visual artist Pippa Hetherington and the world-renowned Keiskamma Art Project virtually held at GFI gallery in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, South Africa.

Attachment to land is an ever-present source of tension in South Africa. Currently, there is fiercely contested political debate around land reform. People continue to be hurt in this process of reckoning. Land ownership in our country is steeped in our collective —bloody and brutal— history. Tribal wars, Frontier wars, Anglo-Boer wars, and Zulu wars, to name but a few, were all the consequence of disputes about land rights: who belonged to the land and who the land belonged to. Stories of loss and violation and heartbreak in these places have become inseparable from the conflicting meanings South Africans read into the land they inhabit. Our shared landscape is our shared history, a history from which we cannot disentangle ourselves.

2020 marks 200 years since the arrival of the 1820 British Settlers in South Africa. Mostly urban dwellers from the cities of England, the 1820 Settlers were allocated land on the southern bank of the Great Fish River in the Eastern Cape on a promise of greener pastures, a new future, and an opportunity to escape from crippling economic hardship in the motherland. The soil was arid and challenging to till, so cattle quickly became a prized local commodity to the British settlers, as they were, historically, to the Xhosa. However, it was soon apparent to the settlers that they were part of a cohort of recruits who had been strategically enlisted to act as a buffer between the Xhosa people north of the Great Fish River, and the British-ruled Eastern Cape to the south.

While there are many written testimonies by British settlers, what we know of the Xhosa north of the Great Fish River comes primarily from oral storytelling. One of the best-known stories is that of Nongqawuse, a young Xhosa prophetess who claimed that the ancestral spirits had spoken to her on the banks of the Gxarha River, telling her that the Xhosa nation should kill their cattle and destroy their crops. In exchange the spirits would drive the British settlers into the sea. She relayed these prophesies to the elders, who then instructed the Xhosa nation to obey what the ancestors had communicated. This led to millions of Xhosa cattle being killed in 1856-7. This tragic action, together with the destruction of crops, led to widespread and devastating famine.

Two centuries later, a group of artists—female descendants from Xhosa and 1820 Settler families— have come together to share their stories. Using stitching, textile, photography and fabric, they make art that tells poignantly of their painful, entwined histories: histories that are impossible to disentangle.

The word ‘Settler’ is an ideologically-laden term, given South Africa’s bitter history of racial domination and segregation. But the Keiskamma artists show that we can strive to reconfigure our shared histories, in a way that opens up, rather than silences, dialogue and ultimately healing. By sewing fragments of culturally distinctive or significant fabrics into conversation and binding them together as a whole, the Keiskamma women create beauty from an eclectic, and often surprising, combination of textiles and patterns. The garments become sites of dialogue, not singular conversations, expressing interwoven, rather than parallel, histories and identities.

The Keiskamma Art Project
Embroiderers Nozeti Makhubalo, Nomonde Mtandana, Nomfundo Makhubalo, Nothandile Bopani; visual artist, Cathy Stanley; and wire artist, SiyaMaswana, are part of the artist collective, the Keiskamma Art Project. Through an artist residency in Cape Town and workshops in Hamburg, Eastern Cape, the artists have worked alongside Pippa Hetherington, delving into shared histories.

Founded in 2000, the Keiskamma Art Project in Hamburg, Eastern Cape, showcases alluring textile works, beadwork and wireworks, all of which aid in the archiving of the Eastern Cape rural collective memory and preservation of oral history. The Project has won a number of awards, including the Business and Arts South Africa (BASA) Award and the Chairman’s Premier Award (2011) which recognises sustained and extraordinary commitment to the arts in South Africa.

The Projects’ major artworks are found in several national and international collections, including the parliament buildings in Cape Town as well as the permanent collections at the University of South Africa, the University of Witwatersrand and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum. The Keiskamma Art Project also provides income and other forms of essential support for many families through its cohesive network of women and youth.

Pippa Hetherington
Hetherington obtained a Masters in Fine Art through the International Center of Photography-Bard College, New York, USA. Her work invites questions around family, history, cultural identity and memory. Working with photography, video documentary and textiles, she explores untold stories of loss and remembrance. She is co-founder of Behind the Faces, a pan-African women’s storytelling project, launched at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, in 2013. Her work has been published in international and national publications. In 2012 she established an online photographic archive, available through Africa Media Online. She has been represented in solo and group exhibitions in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Durban (South Africa); London (UK); Dublin (Ireland); New York City and Washington, DC (USA).

Virtual opening via ZOOM on August 12 – please email manager@gfiartgallery.com for more information