George Hallett: Home and Exile – Bulletins

Exhibition Research Lab (ERL) Gallery proclaims George Hallett: Home and Exile an exhibition curated by Dr Christine Eyene bringing collectively works by South African photographer George Hallett (1942–2020) who lived in exile in Europe from 1970 to the mid-Nineteen Nineties. 

Introduced to literature, music, and visible arts by South African authors Richard Rive, James Matthews, and visible artist Peter E. Clarke, Hallett developed his follow as a self-taught road photographer in Cape Town within the Sixties. His early pictures depict road scenes in locations such because the combined space of District Six reclassified “white” by the apartheid authorities in 1966, and cultural figures and moments that have been to turn into main themes all through his profession. As a South African of combined heritage, his expertise of discrimination and the shortage {of professional} alternatives, led him to exile. He first settled in England in 1970 earlier than shifting to France and the Netherlands.

George Hallett: Home and Exile focuses on the primary a part of his exile, with pictures taken in England within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. The exhibition articulates three principal themes: visible artists with portraits of pioneering figures akin to Gerard Sekoto, Dumile Feni and Gavin Jantjes, jazz musicians, and experimental designs for the e book covers of Heinemann’s African Writers Series then led by editor James Currey. The exhibition concludes with Hallett’s return to South Africa with pictures of Nelson Mandela through the nation’s first democratic elections in 1994, that earned him a World Press Photo award in 1995.

The pictures introduced are a part of the George Hallett Research Collection developed by Eyene to protect, analysis, and disseminate the work of Hallett and South African artists who lived in exile throughout apartheid.

The accompanying public program organised with gallery assistants Kabir D’Silva and Nele Washbourne consists of three conversations between the curator and visitors, literature, music, and movie screenings.

Wednesday, May 13, 6:30–8pm: Exile and Liberation with Gavin Jantjes
In this dialog artist Gavin Jantjes and Christine Eyene will focus on the photographer and visible artist’s friendship and collaboration over thirty years, in addition to the shifts in Jantjes’s follow, from socio-politically oriented works to an aesthetic of imaginary and freedom. The dialogue may also revisit Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free! A Retrospective 1970–2023 curated by Salah M. Hassan at Sharjah Art Foundation in 2023 and introduced at Whitechapel Gallery (London), in 2024. 

Wednesday, June 3, 6:30–8pm: British Art History—Forgotten Chapters with Professor Tamar Garb
Art historian and curator Professor Tamar Garb will focus on the artwork and lifetime of artist Dumile Feni (1942-1991) who lived in exile in London and New York from 1968 to 1991. The dialog will make clear the artist’s expertise in London within the 70s, constructing on Garb’s analysis into materials from the Grosvenor Gallery and the seminal Contemporary African Art exhibition at Camden Art Centre in 1970. 

Tuesday, June 16, 6:30–8pm: Documenting Anti-Apartheid Struggle with Gideon Mendel
Followed by a screening of Biko’s Children (2008) by Breeze Yoko
Coinciding with the 50^th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising that erupted on 16 June 1976, this occasion will give attention to the photojournalistic documentation of the anti-apartheid wrestle by way of the work of Ernest Cole, Sam Nzima, Peter Magubane, Rashid Lombard, and Gideon Mendel’s personal expertise of protecting the wrestle as a younger photographer and revisiting his archive immediately. It may also deal with the legacy of those pictures within the follow of a youthful technology of artists.

Thursday, July 2, 5–8pm: Word. Sound. Image with Eugene Skeef and Imruh Bakari
A multidisciplinary tackle George Hallett’s work, on the intersection of literature, music, and pictures. The night will embrace efficiency and music with poet and percussionist Eugene Skeef, additionally featured in George Hallett’s pictures, and a screening of Blue Notes and Exiled Voices (1992) by Imruh Bakari, filmmaker and co-director of the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive. 

George Hallett: Home and Exile exhibition and public programme are supported by Liverpool John Moores University’s Institute of Art and Technology (IAT) and Enhancing Research Cultures Grant on the theme of ‘Decolonial Research Culture’.

ERL Gallery is co-directed by Dr Christine Eyene and Dr James Schofield.