18 May 2009 History with its layers of fiction, lies, secrets and erasures is the material for key works on the exhibition programme for the National Arts Festival (Grahamstown 2 to 11 July 2009).

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Blood Diamonds, a performance art installation by Brett Bailey, takes audiences into the dark corners of Grahamstown, and into the murky crannies of our past. The raw power of Bailey’s assault on the imagination guarantees catharsis.

The ghosts of installation haunt many of the images in a collection titled Beyond the Documentary Photograph curated by Heidi Erdmann and Jacob Lebeko. The overall proposition is that the photographer’s art starts with making an image or installation and then translating it into two-dimensions with the camera. Again, a sense of layers in time and practice reinforce the disquieting portent that hovers in the gallery.  

Xhosa rituals that mark passages of personal history are the under layers of Umtshotsho by Young Artist Award Winner Nicholas Hlobo. A keen and irreverent social observer, he pinpoints the high-tech urban moves that can be equated to older traditions for celebrating identity and social status.

Hlobo joins a prestigious group of previous awardees in the Standard Bank Young Artists 25: Retrospective. The 25-year history of the visual art Young Artist Award sponsored by the Standard Bank is tracked in a retrospective of winner’s work curated by the late Professor Alan Crump and Barbara Freemantle. The work on show invites the imagination to walk through a quarter of a century of aesthetic innovation and inspired patronage.

Engaging with the practice of shaving young men’s heads when they join the army, Paul Emmanuel’s Transitions summons up the ancient link between identity and appearance, with hair as an emotional focus. His evocative video is accompanied by extraordinary drawings on photographic paper that takes photo-realism to a new plane.

Gillian Ruth de Vlieg’s exhibition Rise Up! demonstrates the fact that the documentary photographer, whose aim is to capture moments in history, also produces timeless images with universal resonance. De Vlieg was one of the few women photographers working on the front line of the struggle for democracy.

The medium is part of the message for Bronwen Findlay whose lifelong love-affair with colour and the physicality of paint manifests itself in an exhibition she calls Matter and Treasure and Paint. The idea of the painted image as a repository of history is reinforced by personal objects imbedded in the layers of several of the works.