Reflections:
on Black girlhood

2 Sept - 31 oct 2024, Market Photo Workshop
Curated by Danielle Bowler

Woven into this group exhibition are reflections on Black girlhood from five contemporary South African artists across multiple generations. Collectively they sing “a black girl’s song” (to cite Ntozake Shange), exploring themes of memory, biography, performance, the body, community, care and “being in public”, through creative practices of waywardness, play and (insistently) joy.

But
isn’t it funny?
That when they ask about black childhood,
all they are interested in is our pain,
as if the joy-parts were accidental.

Koleka Putuma, Black Joy 

Working against the portrait as capture, or figurative representation as the sole definition of portraiture, the works in this show turn to the abstract, out-of-focus and absent, in their poetic, tender, embodied, and life-filled offerings. In the intimacy of building community and chosen family, of twinned siblinghood and home, they reverberate in their reflections, asking us how and who we see. As portals, they are portraits in perpetual motion: questioning, holding, seeing and reflecting Black girlhood in all its expansiveness. 

Whether throwing light, giving serious consideration, as consequence or commentary, the meaning of ‘reflection’ is amplified here. These are images and imaginings of return, of seeking and seeing, of reflection as memory, re-collection and re-memory – of engaging the refracted mirror, whether person or object. Through sound, image, video and sculpture, the artists ask for our own reflections on Blackness and girlhood, as they present theirs.

“Whether throwing light, giving serious consideration, as consequence or commentary, the meaning of “reflection” is amplified here.” - Danielle Bowler