UNREST comes to the Standard Bank Gallery tomorrow.
The photographic exhibition by twins Hasan and Husain Essop, last year’s Standard Bank Young Artists for Visual Arts, finally comes to Joburg for a month-long run.
It was first exhibited at the National Arts Festival and has since travelled to Port Elizabeth, Durban, (their home town) Cape Town, Bloemfontein and now comes to Joburg.
The huge canvasses depict images from around the Cape Flats – the Essop’s stomping ground. These are produced spherically, with the photographer moving in a circle, starting with the camera pointed down, before moving it up by 15° and again moving in a full circle.
Being named Standard Bank Young Artists allowed the Essop twins the opportunity to move beyond only creating large-scale photographs to include in the exhibition an installation depicting two figures in camouflage robes, in front of a Qur’an stand. This symbolises their making a promise to fight their own bad deeds and egos.
The video installation that accompanies the exhibition depicts their namesakes – the grandsons of the Prophet Muhammad – and they reference the commemoration of the violent death of the one in the moving images.
Ever since they first started making art for public consumption, the two have used themselves as subjects so that any questions would be directed at them, and their work would be about the choices they make. It is a long-standing tradition in Islam not to depict sentient living beings in order not to encourage idolatry.
But, the two are drawn to interrogating the clash between their traditional Islamic upbring and the influence of Western pop culture and photography that always fascinated them as students at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts.
The first two pictures in Unrest highlight the sense of community to which they were exposed as children through their religion. Then the pictures shift forwards in reference to their contemporary experience as adults.
A picture of black-clad men hiding their faces as they casually lean against a Sea Point jungle gym, projects an air of menace and is most emblematic of the exhibition’s name which deliberately plays on the violent undertone of several of the pictures.
Residencies in Amsterdam and travels to Jerusalem, Germany and Senegal, as well as completing the Hajj to Mecca, have taught them that South Africa affords them a rare opportunity to practice and express their Muslim faith in relative tolerance when compared to some places they have been.
But, the paranoia around violence and crime both encounter in daily life, living and working on the Cape Flats, is also unique. This sense of paranoia is something they chose to highlight with Unrest in order to question what it does to the psyche of residents.
• Unrest, Standard Bank Gallery, cnr Frederick and Simmonds sts, until June 20.