Durban racial histories laid bare
AN EXHIBITION that explores the family archives of people racialised as Coloured and Indian in Durban under the 1950 Group Areas Act, Proclamation 73, is being held at the Durban Art Gallery until February 15.
It stems from a project initiated by Chandra Frank and Zara Julius who, inspired by their own family histories, set out to collect family photographs of everyday lived experiences.
Proclamation 73 portrays narratives on the meaning of loss, kinship and home by drawing on the family album, and includes photographs of weddings, beach days, ballroom dance contests, street portraits and other snapshots.
Frank and Julius say the exhibition investigates and challenges how different racial histories and segregation continues to operate within the city of Durban and its surroundings.
Through weaving representations of “the everyday” together with photographs of the aftermath of forced removals, Proclamation 73 seeks to disrupt static racial categories, especially taking into account how categories such as “coloured” and “Indian” were used as tools of anti-blackness, they say.
The exhibition takes its title from Proclamation 73, issued in 1951, in which Indians were further categorised as a subdivision of people racialised as coloured.
The exhibition covers a large time period, working with archives that are rarely viewed alongside one another.
Through portraying a variety of images, archival materials, family photographs and selected work from the collection of Afrapix, documentary photographers Peter McKenzie and Rafs Mayet, the exhibition, they say, invites viewers to think about questions of representation, erasure and intimacy.
Frank is a PhD candidate and independent curator. She holds an MPhil in African Studies from the University of Cape Town and is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Julius is a multidisciplinary artist, social researcher and vinyl selector in Johannesburg.