Lien Botha: Viewing Room

In Lien Botha’s work the photograph – as text, object or trace – intersects and interweaves a collection of recurring concerns which her practice – spanning more than thirty years – has continuously investigated and ruminated upon: memory, meaning, experience, object and place. These concerns do not operate autonomously, but are rather always presented as interdependent and mutually generative. The photograph, conceptualised beyond the rigidities of the documentary frame to which post-Apartheid photography in South Africa is so often inclined to, becomes an active site of memory – both personal and collective. As a living, generative space, it both recalls real places in space and time and reimagines them through complex networks of association and narrative. This duality endows Botha’s photographs with an undeniable enigma and surrealism, sitting somewhere between object and place, real and unreal, tangible and intangible.