Gated community is a term used for parks with beautiful houses where wealthy people feel protected by high fences and grim men at the GATE from potentially dangerous fellow citizens. Symmetrically flipped like the positive negative of a photo, the term can be seen as a metaphor for confining and marginalizing part of a population, like in a ghetto. Lindeka Qampi shows us photos from the hard life in her township Khayelitsha near Cape-Town, and of privileged neighborhoods with private beaches. In Hamburg she photographed daily life on markets, subways, exhibition openings, just as European tourists would do when traveling on the African continent. In a series of performative self-portraits she used Hamburg as a stage back-drop.  In addition, she documented during her two months stay traces of the colonial activities of some of Hamburg’s citizens that led to economic empires. Exhibition is curated by Stephan Köhler with M.Bassy.

With the kind support of the BKM and Liebelt-Stiftung Hamburg 

Photos taken in Cape-Town and Hamburg, investigating inclusion and exclusion. 3rd guest of Reversed Exploration, an artists’ residence in Hamburg hosted by Kulturforum Süd-Nord.

About Lindeka Qampi

Lindeka Qampi*1969 was born in Bolotwa in the Eastern Cape. Qampi began taking photographs in 2006, when she met members of the Iliso Labantu (the eye of the people), a community-based photo collective. She began as a street photographer and photographing weddings, events, and portraits. Soon she moved on to exploring her community in different ways, such as a project on street culture. She focuses her lens on daily township life, with particular attention on Khayelitsha, the township in which she has lived since her teens. Her photographs express the poetry and politics of the ‘ordinary act’ and therein the potential of imagining new possibilities for the future. In 2015 Kulturforum Süd-Nord invited her and Zanele Muholi to come to Benin to give photo-workshops to teenagers on the theme of violence towards women.
 
 
Exhibitions and websites:
research-without-borders.org
'Life Framed' the Lindeka Qampi Story
 
2018 The Women's Mobile Museum, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA)Pride & Loss, Jenkins Johnson Gallery (Brooklyn, New York, USA)
2017 Turbine Art Fair (Johannesburg, South Africa)
36 Frames & Under 18’s Only, AVA Gallery (Cape Town, South Africa)
Seeing Ourselves / Themselves, North-West University Gallery (Potchefstroom, South Africa) 
Cape Town Art Fair (Cape Town, South Africa)
2016 SitDitAf Aardklop Arts Festival (Potchefstroom, South Africa)
Visual Activism Cultural Exchange Programme (VACEP), Kunstplass (Oslo, Norway)
2015 Two person exhibition with Zanele Muholi, MAN Museum (Nuoro, Italy)
Visual Activism Cultural Exchange Programme (VACEP), Kunstplass (Oslo, Norway)
Breaking Surface, Galerie NOKO (Port Elizabeth, South Africa) 
Am I Not A Man and a Brother; Am I Not A Woman and a Sister, Archer Gallery, Clark College (Vancouver, Washington, USA)

»Reversed Exploration«

Kulturforum Sud-Nord started the thematic residence "Reversed Exploration" summer 2020 to reverse the roles of the discoverer and the discovered. Artists from the Global South are invited to explore Hamburg and deconstruct traces of the colonial past in public spaces and museum collections. Kulturforum Sud-Nord and M.Bassy collaborate to share this process with the public of Hamburg and create platforms of sustainable debates. Kulturforum Sud-Nord received support for Lindeka Qampi's stay in Hamburg from the Liebelt Foundation and the Hamburg Ministry of culture and media.

facebook.com/dekolonisieren
instagram: @Kulturforum_Sud_Nord
twitter: @kultursudnord

 

Opening: Saturday, June 18th, 7PM
Opening hours: June 19th to July 2nd, 2022
Thursdays to Sundays 2PM – 8PM
Please reserve: reservation@m-bassy.org
M.Bassy, Schlüterstrasse 80, 20146 Hamburg.  

3.Juli-10.Juli: Only with appointment: reservation@m-bassy.org

June 30th, 7PM Artist Talk
at the MARKK, Zwischenraum, a conversation with the artist and the curators. In English.
 
Museum am Rothenbaum, MARKK