Author: Monique Pelser
Conversations with my Father
Installation View, National Arts Festival 2015
About the work
Conversations with my Father is a continuous dialogue (2011 – to date) between myself and the objects, images, sound recordings and documents I inherited in 2010 after my father died of a rare motor neuron disease which rendered him unable to speak for the last year and a half of his life. The Conversation aims to manage and deconstruct the found footage and objects as a means of looking at and understanding trauma.
Both my paternal grandfather and my father were South African Police (SAP). My father was a good man, he was a good father, he was also a product of his environment. In my investigation I turn the forensic gaze onto the evidence of my father as official. This act of scrutinizing, archiving, layering and manipulating allows me to engage with the father as the allegorical figure for patriarchy and by extension authority.
Publicity
http://artthrob.co.za/2015/07/27/in-conversation-with-monique-pelser/
http://artthrob.co.za/2015/12/11/best-of-the-year-artthrobs-lists/
Goodman Gallery artist profile; September 2011
Sean O’Toole; Sunday Times Lifestyle; The Big Picture; March 11, 2007 Download PDF = 246KB
Anthea Buys; The Spirit is Not an Idea, Says the Penguin; Review; 2010
Sabelo Mlangeni: Invisible Woman II 2006
A review by Monique Pelser
NYPD Interviews
Digital video installation duration 11:09
Digital video installation duration 17:10
Digital video installation duration 21:13
Digital video installation duration 19:58
About the work
During the School of Visual Art’s PhotoGlobal residency programme I was awarded in 2012/13 I worked with a number of New York City police officers.
These four video portraits are an example of the footage I captured after the long conversations I had with the officers in and around New York City and Brooklyn.
I was fortunate to work in independent study with Richard Pepperman at the SVA film school who met with me weekly teaching me how to engage further with and develop the project.
This work was made as a way of exploring the dynamic between myself, the sitter, the camera and the viewer. Doing so I have set up a triangle where I have sat away from the camera creating a sense that the viewer is privy to our conversation.
Exhibitions and exposure
Installation view at the School of Visual Arts New York City Alumni Gallery 2014
Publicity
It Changes Phase
About the work
‘It changes phase’ is the scientific phrase for the transformation of water into vapor and back again. These composite cloudscapes, photographed mostly in the Highveld in South Africa, deal with the ephemeral nature of information and stand in as a metaphor for transience and change.
Photographed with my Blackberry Smartphone they are then Bluetoothed to my computer where the data is processed and stitched together. These digital images are then saved on a hard drive and are exhibited as projections, never taking form as a fixed photographic print. In a similar way that water particles transform from a liquid solid into vapor and back again to form clouds so does digital information and image transfer transform in this process.
Exhibitions and exposure
Goodman Gallery Cape Town as part of The Night Show with other artists such as Stuart Bird, Ian Grose, Gugulective, Musa Nxumalo, Linda Stupard, Gerald Machona 2011
https://guerillaza.blogspot.com/2019/11/cloud-series-behind-scenes.html
https://guerillaza.blogspot.com/2020/02/talking-clouds-monique-pelser-q.html
The Johanesburg Station Panels: Revisited
About the work
In the early 1930’s J.H Pierneef – the most influential and prominent historical South African landscape painter – was commissioned by the railway services to travel South Africa and paint select sites reached by the capillary railways. Famously known as the Johannesburg Station Panels, these paintings depict scenes of mining, industry, seaside villages and sprawling uninhibited landscapes. The panels, which were exhibited in the concourse of the Johannesburg Railway Station until the abolishment of the apartheid government in the 1990’s, were intended to create the effect that the station was the gateway to a glorious and unknown landscape.
Pierneef spent days in the various sites making watercolour sketches and gathering visual data. He would then go back into his studio and construct an ideally composed painting. These photographic studies form part of a larger process of tracing, pinpointing the perspectives and photographing the iconic landscapes.
In addition to the photographic prints there are digital screens documenting studies of how the camera responds to the shifting light. These works are new photographic studies made in response to the process Pierneef went through making observational sketches of the site and the surrounding environment.
Exhibitions and exposure
This work toured around South Africa opening at the University of Stellebosch Gallery in 2012 and then moved to the Oliwenhuis in 2013 and the Durban Art Gallery 2014.
These images won the Tierney Fellowship award for 2009 and were on exhibition at the Wits University Sub Station Gallery in Johannesburg as work-in-progress as part of the Tierney Fellowship annual exhibition.
The work was then shown as part of the Tierney Fellowship group exhibition at the New York Photo Festival at the Tobacco Warehouse Dumbo Brooklyn New York.
Publicity
http://issuu.com/carlbecker/docs/becker-pelser2012
http://issuu.com/carlbecker/docs/becker-pelser2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSXIyHZkv2E SABC Morning Live ; 2013
http://www.rsg.co.za/Program/81/RSG-Kuns ; 2013
http://artycok.tv/lang/en-us/8090/farewell-to-longing-figurations-of-heimat-in-contemporary-art-2 ; 2011
Claudia Marion Stemberger; Farewell to Longing; catalogue June 10, 2011
Sean O’Toole; Pierneef’s Art; Times Live, December 12, 2010
Tierney Fellowship Group Exhibition; April 2010 Download PDF = 122KB
Bystanders
About the work
Bystanders (2008) is a series of extreme close-up portraits re-appropriated from South African newspaper archives. The portraits, taken with my Nokia cellular telephone, are of background characters caught in photographs reporting on historical events in South African history.
These marginal bystanders perform as a metaphor for the experience of seeing myself, as a young South African, in the background of a complex national history manifesting itself.
The haunting and lyrical portraits have a momentum mori quality bringing attention to the occasionally violent crop of the camera and the formal pixelated quality of the images, done intentionally as a means of breaking down an image into it smallest form, acts as an annotation of both surveillance and forensic photography.
Exhibitions and exposure
This work was printed onto newsprint and was installed along 7 blocks in St Georges Mall in Cape Town as part of Infecting the City Public Arts Festival Cape Town 2014. The work was made to imitate newspaper poster boards, which put the images that were taken from newspaper archives back into circulation.
Wits University Staff Group Show for the WALE (Wits Art and Literature Experience) with Jo Ractliffe, Penny Siopis, Karel Nel, Jeremy Wafer and Robert Hodgins in Johannesburg 2008.
Unnatural History as part of the Month of Photography with Inge Prins and Anonia Steyn at the MutiGallery in Cape Town 2008.
Group Summer Show at the iArt Gallery with artists Wilma Cruise, Diane Victor, Paul Emsely, Colbert Mashile and William Kentridge in Cape Town 2008.
Director Miles Goodall from Suburban Films directed a documentary film called Kool South featuring a group of contemporary South African artists and showcasing Bystanders.
Maputo curators meeting organised and funded by the Goethe Institute where the work was presented to curators namely Kwesi Gule, Colette Olof, Simon Njami, Akin Bode, and Bisi Silva.
Bisi Silva (The Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos, Nigeria) exhibited the work as part of a show In Light of Play shown at the Durban Art Gallery in 2009 and the Johannesburg Art Fair 2009.
Publicity
RSG radio interview for Infecting the City 2014
Sean O’Toole; Sunday Times Lifestyle; The Big Picture; March 11, 2007 Download PDF = 246KB
http://photoartsmagazine.blogspot.com/2012/07/monique-pelser.html
Bisi Silva; ArtSpeakAfrica; March 08, 2009
Sean O’Toole; Snapped Magazine; UnNatural History; December 03, 2008 Download PDF = 1.71MB
Looking in from the outside
Pieter Hugo’s new exhibition explores the politics of economic division, writes Monique Pelser.
Roles
About the work
In the manner of the German photographer August Sander, I sought out and photographed a range of South African vocational archetypes: the builder, the mechanic, the petrol attendant, the nurse, the airline steward, the suburban security guard.
Complicating these unceremonious portraits I inserted myself into every frame, inhabiting – quite literally – the dress (clothes, shoes, jewellery, spectacles) of my subjects, who in turn wore my clothes and took my picture.
The process involved taking a portrait of the sitter and then inverting the roles by changing clothes with the sitter and he/ she would take the portait of me performing their role. In doing so I was attempting to challenge the signs of identity construction through photography, as well as, interrogating the intense yet fleeting relationship between sitter and photographer.
Exhibitions and exposure
In 2006 the work was awarded a distinction as a masters of fine art submission at Rhodes University.
Art South Africa featured the work, which can be viewed at http://www.artsouthafrica.com/?article=38
Subsequently I was voted as the Brightest Young Artist for 2007 (Art South Africa Magazine v5.3).
The show travelled South Africa and was shown as a solo show at the Market Photography Workshop, Johannesburg as well as the Bell Roberts Gallery, Cape Town.
Maureen De Jager, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Rhodes Universtiy, has written and presented a seminar paper entitled The Cameras Lies: Role-Playing, Posing and imposture in the Self Portrait Photography of Monique Pelser and Samuel Fosso.
Publicity
http://archivalimpulse.blogspot.com/2012/04/exhibited-artist-monique-pelser.html 2011
http://www.artthrob.co.za/07jul/reviews/bellroberts.html; 2007
Art Throb On-Line Magazine; June 2007
Sean O’Toole; Art South Africa Magazine v5.3 (online version); Identity Swap; April 2007 Download PDF = 507KB
Bell-Roberts artist profile; April 2007
Sean O’Toole; Sunday Times Lifestyle; The Big Picture; March 11, 2007 Download PDF = 246KB
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