Anton Kannemeyer's Tactics of Translation as Critical Lens

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Published: May 1, 2012
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.17286
Keywords:
kennemeyer afrikaans afrikaner racism south africa translation apartheid comics
John Tyson
Abstract
Anton Kannemeyer (b.1967) is a white Afrikaner artist whose work engages with translation: subject matter culled from historical archives, comics, and the mass media is transposed into different languages, artistic mediums, and styles. Kannemeyer's artworks use translation as a means of returning to and interrogating traumatic, historical events. The beholder is prompted to (re)engage painful aspects of the past, approached from the critical distance allowed by the deferral implicit in translation. By re-encountering history in the gallery, the viewer must confront her memory and reconcile or interrogate disjunctions proposed in the space of Kannemeyer's work. Thus, with the re-imagining of events as translations in a new language, there is the possibility for a renewed investigation of received histories and a working over of traumas of the past.
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Author Biography
John Tyson

John A. Tyson is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Emory University (Atlanta, USA). During 2011-12 he was a Helena Rubinstein fellow of critical studies in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He is presently writing his dissertation, ‘Hans Haacke: Beyond Systems Esthetics.’  Additionally, in his prior research, he has focused on art of the African diaspora and African art.

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