VIENNA, AUSTRIA.- Kunsthalle Vienna presents Black, Brown, White - Photography from South Africa, on view through June, 18, 2006. More than ten years after the end of apartheid, South Africa, the supposedly “rainbow nation”, is a country still torn by inner conflicts. Critics maintain that the democratic process has led only to a re-coloring of the elites, not to a just division of wealth. The rates of violence and criminality remain high and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has achieved, at most, a superficial reconciliation between enemy camps. Against this background, the exhibition Black, Brow, White searches for clues in pictures. Outstanding South African photo artists of various generations, who see themselves not as political documenters but rather as observers of everyday life, will show thematic series of their works which represent diverse facets of a country between apartheid and new departures.

The Indian South African curator and Professor of Film Jyoti Mistry from Johannesburg helped determine the selection of works and made valuable contributions to placing them within the complicated context of South African reality. For a long time, South African photography was dominated by a journalistic tendency which employed the camera as a weapon in the struggle against apartheid. Yet at the same time, beginning with David Goldblatt (born 1930), another direction developed which renounced the spectacle of big political events, mass protests and massacres and instead attempted to plumb the depths of the complex South African psyche through precise observation of everyday life and specific social mileux.