Lizza Littlewort reinterprets Old Masters through sardonic new eyes. By

Littlewort has long been taken up with rendering visible the processes by which white life is made the unexamined norm. Her 2005 exhibit, “Drawing on a White Background”, subjected the self-mythologizing delusions of South Africa’s white coterie to sharply witty scrutiny. With this exhibit, which runs until November 28, she reconstructs hidden histories, exposing the banality behind the historical continuum of white privilege.

“We Live in the Past” owes much to Edward Said and JM Coetzee, but it goes beyond these literary interventions in order to trouble relations between past and the present. One of the exhibition’s most trenchant thematics concerns how white South Africans often responded negatively to the Rhodes Must Fall protests. Historic Panic Mill references this directly, relocating Rembrandt’s The Mill to Rhodes Memorial, where the mill waves its arms in panic over the landscape.

These works foreground the proximity of the artist. A mouthily unfamiliar name — Jakob Willemzoon de Wet — turns out to be Littlewort’s forebear. How he arrives at the Cape highlights how historical narratives are stopped up and blurred; Littlewort transforms the supposedly straightforward landing into a smearing of shapes where only the Africanness of the landscape is emphasised.

For Littlewort, born and raised in middleclass Rondebosch, the exhibition accesses a self-reflexive moment not often found in South African satirical experiments. In The Bankrolling of the Rijksmuseum we see her disdain for the vaunted pomp and ceremony found in Dutch representations of ships anchoring at the Cape. The paintings ask us to reconsider what is not seen.

“We Live in the Past” asks us to understand art as occurring within a wider set of cultural practices than the originals admit. Littlewort sets these ostensibly immobile artworks in motion, creating an alternate archive into which different and more nuanced meanings can be read. They dialogue not only with the works to which they refer, but also with the contexts of exploitation that enabled the works to be produced. LS