To mark the tenth commemoration of Rubis Mécénat’s Of Soul and Joy visual program in the municipality of Thokoza, southeast of Johannesburg in South Africa, the endowment fund is welcoming two South African photographers, Jabulani Dhlamini and Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, to present a collaborative photographic work on the theme of memory at the PhotoSaintGermain Festival in France. Under the curating hand of Valérie Fougeirol, these artists have united their points of view in the exhibition “iHubo-Whispers“, in which individual memories and wounds converge.
Jabulani Dhlamini returned to the wide open spaces of his childhood, and more specifically to Warden, a scene that is saturated with the deep expressions of the ages of the transmitters of history. Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, on the other hand, returned to his family’s bar where memories of nastiness become ghosts implanted in walls and objects-existences replayed in minds that are caught, scratched and consumed.
The “iHubo-Whispers” exhibition, inspired by the Zulu word for “hymn“, an archiving process in the form of a song, driven by a specific goal of preserving history, will be, on view until November 19 at the PhotoSaintGermain festival in Paris, with its two reciprocal aspects, is worked around memories that resurface – at different times, in varied and clear ways – the clues of individual histories that converge and blend, to be able to exist in the Present.