Jo Ractliffe at Michael Stevenson Gallery

As Terras do Fim do Mundo

Artist Jo Ractliffe to showcase her latest at Cape Town’s Michael Stevenson Gallery from 21 October to 27 November 2010.

Over the past two years Ractliffe has been tracing the routes of the Border War fought by South Africa in Angola through the 1970s and 80s, travelling alongside ex-soldiers returning to the places where they fought for the first time since the SADF's withdrawal from the region.

Her new body of work follows Terreno Ocupado (2007), in which she explored the social and spatial demographics of Angola's capital city of Luanda five years after the country's civil war had ended.

She writes: 'during my time in Luanda, a second project began to suggest itself, one in which my attention would shift away from the urban manifestation of aftermath to the "space" of war itself.'

In the black and white photographs of As Terras do Fim do Mundo (The Lands at the End of the World), Ractliffe captures the eerie silence of the traces of war. Her haunting images explore the idea of landscape as pathology, how past violence manifests in the landscape of the present - both forensically and symbolically.

Gallery Times: Monday to Friday 09:00 – 17:00 | Saturday 10:00 – 13:00

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