[Vasundhara Mathur] Christine Eyene will discuss the formation of an independent research collection, bringing together works by South African photographer George Hallett from, focusing on South African exile and Black communities in Britain and beyond in the 1970s and 1980s. She will address issues around the preservation of archives marginalised by mainstream institutions, and how these reflect the state of art histories and practices neglected by dominant narratives. Eyene will also share how her ten-year collaboration with artist and professor of contemporary art Lubaina Himid, in the framework of Making Histories Visible, enabled her to care for, research and disseminate Hallett’s work and contribution to South African, British and diasporic art histories. Eyene is an art historian, critic and curator. She is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool.
[Christine Eyene] So I’m going to talk about a research collection, I mean, the collection that I call, it is a private collection, but I don’t want to call it a private collection. I prefer to call it a research collection because it’s a collection that grew organically of works by the South African photographer George Hallett. And so it’s a collection that grew from the fact that, growing up in France as a Cameroonian African person, our cultures where usually marginalised. So we were not part of the, sort of like, the production of artists who, when I was a kid and a teenager, were practising in Paris, were not within the museum. So, you know, these are artists that we knew from our community, so I grew up around them as a Cameroonian person. I grew up around people who were musicians, so like the music and sound art project that I then curated comes from this heritage of Cameroon. And from the visual artists more, being, having this connection because of my sister who’s ten years older than me brought in our family South African exiles who lived in London and Paris in the 1970s and 1980s. So this is how I got to know about George Hallett. And so I grew up on images that were, you know, in our home, and little by little I became interested in photography because I grew up in Paris and a lot of my friends, you know Paris is the country of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, so we were all into photography, and so I bought a camera.
George Hallett lived in Paris from, I don’t know, the sort of 1980s, and he then went to South Africa for the first democratic, well, to follow Nelson Mandela for the first democratic elections, and bought a camera, and then he came back to Paris and he taught me photography. So he was in a way my mentor and sort of, like, shaped my eye in terms of visual imagery. So I had those images, so I studied history of art, but I never, obviously when I was younger, I didn’t know I would become a curator. I came to England in 2001 and a few years after there was, so I worked at the Africa Centre up until 2004, so the old Africa Centre in Covent Garden, and Gus Casely-Hayford came to the Africa Centre because he was organising Africa 05. And so I had the opportunity to organise my first exhibition. So this is the first exhibition that I organised at the Spitz Gallery that doesn’t exist anymore, in Spitalfields. And I thought it could be interesting to show images of South African exile who’d lived in London in the 1970s and 1980s. So I did this very small exhibition. And at the time I also did two other collaborations with Africa 05. So I, so from my curatorial fee with Africa 05 I reinvested the money in this project, and invited George Hallett to give a talk in London.
So maybe I should say as well that it’s a sort of like independent collection, but it’s also unfunded. So it’s something that I kept in my flat for many, many years. And, you know, organised myself to do the exhibition but I was lucky to be in conversation with colleagues who work in the field of contemporary African art and Ayo Adeyinka, who’s director of TAFETA gallery, I connected with him in 2010 and he put me in contact with Hannah O’Leary, who’s now working with Sotheby’s and was doing these auctions of contemporary African art. And they were doing, and they were having an auction of South African artists and I knew that obviously from the pictures I had that George had documented South African creatives who lived in London in the 1970s and 1980s. And so what I proposed was to do an exhibition of, well, was to lend images of the artists who were, whose work was auctioned at Bonhams. But I didn’t want to sell the collection. For me it was very important to sort of create, I had a sense that it was under, sort of, under-recognised in England. So I wanted to create knowledge around this body of work, so I could have said, oh, you know, I’ll sell the pictures because, you know, I could do with some money. But, but for me it was important to bring those images to provide another layer of understanding of the practice of the artist.
So one of the, so they produced this little leaflet and one of the, I think to me what was important was showing, for instance, an important work by, just this thing, by Gerard Sekoto, who’s a pioneer of African modernism. And to have this picture on the right, which is the photograph I had when I was doing my MA on Gerard Sekoto. And so I’m, like, very much attached to this picture, but it sort of showed the artist with this painting that was a homage to Steve Biko. So the multiple layers in these images, both documenting South African exiles, so in the case of Gerard Sekoto, he lived in Paris, but also anti-apartheid activist, activism which is embedded in Gerard Sekoto’s painting.
And so basically, I had those images in 2005, I did this first exhibition in 2010, did something, but it’s really from after that I started looking, because I had those images and I didn’t really look at them. They were sort of stacked on top of each other. And little by little I, I started, like, as I became more embedded within the London art scene, I was in conversation with more institutions, and I decided that I would lend those images, so when I felt that they were, when I knew that they were a project, because also curating is quite a territorial practice where sometimes people don’t share what they’re doing and, you know, they sort of want to, yeah, they don’t want to share knowledge. And, but at the time Tessa Jackson, who was director of iniva, was organising this exhibition by Peter Clarke and I told her, actually I have pictures of Peter Clarke. And so I lent those images. This thing doesn’t work.
But anyway, the far left images I lent of Peter Clarke and the same year, well, actually, in 2012 I started working with Lubaina Himid as part of the project called Making Histories Visible, which is her own archive. So that’s also a, sort of like, very important project, where she has like, paperwork, books and artwork from artists from the 1980s. Some of it were lent to Women in Revolt. And, and so Lubaina proposed, so I told to her I’ve got all these images in my flat. They’re taking so much space and I don’t know what to do. And she said oh, bring them to the University of Central Lancashire at UCLan where I was working. So I brought the images. We also applied for a grant, the university had a grant for distinguished speakers. So we applied to have money to invite George. And George came, I think it was April 2014. And the day when he came, we had this bookseller who was, like, selling his stock, and he had a lot of books for which George had designed the covers of the African Writers Series. So what’s interesting with this series is that it’s both, it’s both connected with African literature, like, independence African literature.
But the images that George used were images of, both images that he took before leaving South Africa in a place called District Six, which was, like, in Cape Town, which is a mixed area, so white, ‘coloured’. I’m using an air quote because it’s, it’s a term that was pejorative and it’s a term that comes from the apartheid regime. But it’s also, there are also some people from this community that reclaim this identity. And white people, so everyone, and Black people, everyone was mixed, and into, in 1966 the government decided to declare District Six a white area. So they decided to remove everyone. And George, who was then a young, like he wasn’t a photographer, he was just starting. And he decided, he was encouraged by Peter Clarke and James Matthews, who’s a protest poet, to document District Six before its demolition. So actually George started to create a visual archive of this community before, you know, it was, everyone was expelled and the area was demolished. And my work with these photographs was also to, sort of like, consider them as an archive and preserve them. So the book covers have both images that he took in 1966 to 1968 in Cape Town, but also South African exiles who lived in London.
So the images are both related to the narratives of the books, but also to the existence and the presence of those South African exiles who were visual artists, musicians, activists. Yeah. And, and so, and my research has been looking at their existence in London and in relation to African literature from, from the independence years. So here you see George who, with the bookseller, and I told him actually this, he’s the photographer who did the covers, so the bookseller was really excited, and George and, at the bottom, you see with Lubaina, when George gave a talk at the university and also, so these are actually the books that Lubaina bought for Making Histories Visible. So, they were part of the archive.
And so what I did with the, so I had those pictures of African writers because George not only did the covers but also took pictures of the writers, because for him it was very important. He would both take pictures of, you know, writers, musicians, visual artists, activists, but also people from the community. So for him, everyone was important. It was important for him to document Black lives. And so I had those images that he gave me. I was, and I remember when he gave me these pictures when he came to London and, and for him, it was images that he would never, I mean, he probably exhibited them in the 1980s, but he would, he wouldn’t like, exhibit them now. He would want to reproduce, like, better-quality prints. But to me, they became, like, those sort of archive images and they took on another value.
And so what I tried to do, obviously I don’t have a, the book, so ‘Second Class Citizen’, I don’t have the original book published by Heinemann, the African Writers Series, but I displayed, so we had an exhibition of George’s work at the university gallery and at the, at the Making Histories Visible archive. I did, like, a display with some of the books and images that I had. So this is Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Bâ here, and then other material that I had. So, again, those South African exiles were activists who came to London as asylum seekers actually. They also gave me loads of books that they were going to throw away, and they knew I was doing some research on South African art. So the books on the upper slide are books that were going to be thrown away and I collected them and, you know, like, yeah, it was part of like all the mess I had in my flat.
And things like, I remember George gave, when he gave the talk in 2014 at UCLan he was talking about how when he lived in the south of France, he gave, he took pictures of a, what do you call them, people who lived in the countryside and they would have pictures pinned in the, on the walls in their kitchen. And for instance this calendar of 1988 was in the toilet in Paris. So, but it has images, for instance, the woman is from District Six and it had, it has images of a, I don’t know, activist and very important people. But just to say that these were part of our everyday life, but these are important images that talk about the history and the, brought some of my other books. ‘Images’, which is his first book that was published in 1979, and ‘Images of Change’, where he followed Nelson Mandela and could provide another image of changes in South Africa.
So also it was, as I said, it was important for me to share this archive, these images. So I lent some work to The Otolith Group and The Showroom when they did The Chimurenga Library in 2015. So I lent those images, and as you can see at the top of the lower slides, they put a picture of the spines of the African Writers Series books. And also they did some reproductions of the covers that they put on cardboard and all these, the top left were designed by George Hallett and, yeah. And you can see also how this archive was experienced by the community. I also shared it, I exhibited it as part of an exhibition I curated in Limerick as part of EVA International. So these are the books, so I brought my books that were given by, oh, sorry, another friend who was a South African anti-apartheid activist who was imprisoned and had to flee South Africa. So I, you know, I display it there. And here you can see how people are, you know, experiencing the work as well.
And finally, I recently did my PhD, which was a quite a journey. And George, sadly, passed away in 2020, so I was never able to finish the PhD before he passed away. But this is just to show you how I’ve both used some of the images from the archive and also played with the posters, with book covers. And one of them that I enlarged because I thought that it was, in terms of graphic design, very interesting. But I also put some material that I put in a vitrine that showed, that gives another layer of interpretation of his practice. And that’s, I think that’s it. I’ll stop here.
Christine Eyene is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool.