chromogenic print (C-type) from water- and mould-damaged negative on Kodak Endura mounted on dibond

Artwork date: 2016
Signature details: signed on a label on the reverse; accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
Edition: number 1, from an edition of 3 + 2AP

(1)

image size: 100 x 92 cm, sheet size: 100 x 92 cm

© Gideon Mendel courtesy of ARTCO Gallery.

Notes:

Gideon Mendel's intimate style of image-making and long-term commitment to socially engaged projects has earned international acclaim. Born in Johannesburg, Mendel established his career with his searing photographs of the final years of apartheid. It was his work as a "struggle photographer" during this period that first brought his work to global attention. In the early 1990s he moved to London, continuing to respond to global social issues, with a major focus on HIV/AIDS. His first book, A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa, was published in 2001. Since then, he has produced several photographic advocacy projects, working with prominent NGOs. Mendel’s early work was highlighted in the international touring exhibition, Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, curated by Okwui Enwezor. His recent project, titled Dzhangal, an ‘anti-photographic’ response to the global refugee crisis was shown at Autograph, London (2016) and the book published by GOST Books (2017). Since 2007, he has been working on Drowning World, an art and advocacy project about flooding, his personal response to our climate crisis. Drowning World has been exhibited at many galleries, museums, and photo festivals, including Les Recontres de la Photographie in Arles, and used in climate activism in collaboration with Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion. His work has been widely published in prominent publications such as National Geographic, Geo, Guardian Weekend Magazine, and Aperture. Amongst many accolades, Mendel has won the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, six World Press Photo Awards, the Amnesty International Media Award, the Greenpeace Photo Award, and was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet in 2015 (Disorder) and 2019 (Hope). In 2016, he was the first recipient of the Pollock- Krasner Foundation’s Pollock Prize for Creativity. "In 1990 I left a box of negatives and transparencies in storage in Johannesburg, and subsequently forgot about them. Most of them were rejects, outside of my edits, that I then did not consider important. A few years ago they were returned to me and I discovered that at some point in their many years of neglect, the box had been rained on, and top layers had been a"ected by both moisture and mould. The images still carry the power of those scenes I documented all those years ago, yet their corruption and damage seem to magnify that energy." This photograph was taken during a mass political funeral for youths slain in the so-called 'grenade incident' which took place in Duduza township. Eight activists were killed when an undercover agent gave them booby-trapped grenades. East Rand, Gauteng, July 1985. The work o"ered on auction was shown as part of the solo exhibition, Damage, at the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2019); in the Prix Pictet (Hope) exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2019); and thereafter toured internationally. It was also published in the monograph Freedom or Death (GOST Books, 2019) and shown as part of the solo exhibition by the same title at ARTCO Gallery, Cape Town (2020).