South African Broadcasting Corporation, Johannesburg

Artist Graeme Williams South African, born 1961

Date2013, printed in 2016

MediumArchival digital print on Hahnemuhle photo rag paper

Dimensionspaper: 36 x 47 5/8 in. (91.4 x 121 cm)
frame: 40 1/4 x 52 1/4 x 2 in. (102.2 x 132.7 x 5.1 cm)

ClassificationsPhotography

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the African and African American Purchase Fund

Object number2016.15.3

On View

Not on view

Label TextWilliams’s photography captures incomplete or abandoned spaces—devoid of the bodies that should be or were once encountered there. The absence of cars and buses is also starkly apparent and highlighted by the brutal, modernist aesthetic.

Found throughout the continent of Africa and the world, modernist architecture is often associated with such poured-concrete structures, and its rise coincided with the height of South Africa’s apartheid system of legally enforced racial segregation (1950s-1980s). Williams may here be alluding to apartheid’s migrant labor system that forced black South Africans to commute from townships to work in mines or cities. Here, we see a parking garage ramp in the headquarters to the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation, while other images include a bus shelter and an empty beach.ProvenanceCreated Johannesburg, South Africa, 2013; collection of the artist; [Axis Gallery, West Orange, NJ]; sold to NCMA, 2016.
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