Powerful examination of inhumanity and loss

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

With beautiful, seductive images that tell a horrific story, Exhibit B from South Africa’s Third World Bunfight Theatre Company has been a sensation all over the world.

Part installation and part performance, with live singing from Namibian group the Exhibit Quartet, Exhibit B explores European colonialism in Africa and the impact this has had on modern society.

Exhibit B comes to Galway next week when it will be staged in the Black Box theatre from July 14-19 as part of the Galway International Arts Festival.

Through a series of 13 live tableaux, audiences will be asked to face, straight-on, what people are capable of doing to each other.

The tableaux or installations are based on the ‘human zoos’ that prevailed in Europe and America during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They confront the colonial atrocities committed in Africa by Europeans who believed they were a superior race, and they also examine the plight of migrants today.

South African writer and theatre director Brett Bailey had two main aims when he set about devising Exhibit B, he explains.

“I grew up with a system of apartheid that indoctrinated a society into believing in a system of racial supremacy. How does that happen? How, through images, is a system like that given legitimacy?”

Secondly, this white South African man wanted to explore the history of colonialism “and the atrocities it carved out”.

Recent attempts by historians to portray colonialism in a positive light are dangerous, he says.

“Colonialism is not a good thing. Any sharing of culture has a lot of advantages but the colonial process wasn’t about bringing education of healthcare. It was about land-grabs and power.”

Research is an important aspect of Brett’s work in preparing for a show, and for Exhibit B, he has drawn on oral as well as written history and powerful images from the era of slavery.

The resulting tableaux are presented as pieces of art, and include references to Dutch masters and still lives. But the images they portray are unrelenting. These include people in cages and in chains, as well as a depiction of a Kenyan man who was castrated during the Mau Mau uprisings of the 1950s. There’s also an installation of South African Saartjie Baartman, otherwise known as ‘The Hottentot Venus’. She was exhibited as part of 19th century freak shows while alive, and as a scientific exhibit after her death.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.