Beyond the photograph
Jody Brand’s images in ‘You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down’ reflect the experiences of the subjects
From the images collected on her Tumblr page Chomma, one can tell how much friendships have been a catalysing force in Jody Brand’s trajectory as an artist. The Cape Town-based photographer and visual artist’s oeuvre stands at the intersection of popular culture and visual archiving.
With You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down, her first solo show with the Stevenson, Brand turns to friends to create images that are at once reclamatory, uplifting and glamorous. The large-scale images, many ranging around 2m by 3m, although initially subtle in their power, take on an urgent tone once their backstories are factored into their reading. Of particular interest in this regard is Moffie in Irma’s Garden, which derives much of its defiance from being taken spontaneously at the Irma Stern museum.
The 2017 recipient of a Thami Mnyele Foundation residency in Amsterdam, which will see her work closely with Ziyanda Majozi and Zanele Muholi, Brand spoke to the Mail & Guardian a day before jetting off. that will have you feeling like you are not valid or worthy of sharing spaces with such people.
So to have her inside the space, owning the space, is something I am constantly trying to re-enact. The image was shot at the Company’s Garden, which was created by the Dutch East India Company as a vegetable garden they could use en route. The people in the images are homeless and they live in the Company’s Garden. This is also their home. There were seven, I showed five. I am in the beginning stages of a project I see going on for quite some time. So the work isn’t just the taking of the picture. A lot of it is my friendships with these people, our sharing with each other, our experiencing of life together, which entails a lot of emotional labour. What I am really focused on with this work is trying to find strategies of survival for femmeidentifying people in a world that is not meant for their survival. People are dying and it is not just art. It is life and death. For the [group show] The Quiet Violence of Dreams I did a series of installations called Say Her Name, which spoke directly about the murder of Nokuphila Khumalo [who was beaten to death by artist Zwelethu Mthethwa]. Reading all the instances of sexual violence and especially how patriarchy plays into all of that in the book, and thinking about [the location of] the Stevenson gallery in Woodstock, I could not stop thinking about Nokuphila.
It is just something that sat with me, that a photographer within my art community [could have committed this act]. Even though I have never engaged with Zwelethu Mthethwa, I found it completely urgent and necessary to address because nobody else wanted to at that stage.
In an article I read, Nokuphila’s mother wanted to lay pink and white roses where her daughter had died because those were her daughter’s favourite. I wanted to create work that touched on a mother’s suffering. In Cape Town, I suspended pink and white roses from the ceiling, which dried over the course of the exhibition. They really had a lot of presence.
I use the roses that were left over this time — but it is new work. I created a space that is a chapel and I’m inviting the viewers to atone for the violence enacted on black and brown femme bodies every day in this country.