Defiant Visions
Mavis Mtandeki, Jean Benjamin at the United Women's Congress General Council Meeting at a Church in Bellville, 1989.
Marie Meyerding
apexart, 291 Church Street, NY
June 2 - July 29, 2023
Mabel Cetu, Lesley Lawson, Mavis Mtandeki, Zubeida Vallie, Jansje Wissema, Deborah May and Georgina Karvellas
Defiant Visions showcases women photographers’ resistance to the apartheid regime through the lenses of their cameras. Apartheid was a system of institutionalized discrimination against people of color that existed in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. During decades of oppression, these women took photographs to expose not only racist but also gender-discriminatory social, economic and political structures. This exhibition explores the work of practitioners employing black and white imagery to focus on the women surrounding them. Mabel Cetu’s appearance in the 1950s magazine Zonk! sheds light on her own training and her portrayals of modern womanhood. Jansje Wissema depicted women’s ordinary lives in the extraordinary site of District Six before and after its destruction by the government during the early 1970s. As members of the photographic collective Afrapix, Zubeida Vallie and Lesley Lawson captured women’s grief and struggle at the height of eruptive violence during the 1980s, while Mavis Mtandeki recorded township life and the changing women’s political organizations during the country’s democratic transition in the early 1990s. The exhibition also presents the short documentary You Have Struck A Rock (1981), edited by Deborah May and Georgina Karvellas to document the famous 1956 Women’s March and its aftermath. Alongside photographic prints and film, magazines and photobooks will be on display, highlighting the work of women photographers on life under apartheid.
