Faces

Portraitures

London, UK
2014

In the work Faces, Nadia Kaabi-Linke restores dignity and personal identity to the South Africans who, according to the Englishman Frank Fillis, were hunted and collected to be displayed as living objects in the Kaffir Kraal at the Greater Britain Exhibition in Earl’s Court in 1899. A historical photograph from this time shows a group of people in front of a staged African landscape, dressed in costumes meant to depict them as “savages” on the fringes of civilization. These individuals were assigned a collective identity, reduced to mere objects of exhibition.

 

In contrast, Kaabi-Linke’s portrait series deconstructs these stereotypes and the colonial division into “us” and “them”. Each subject is portrayed as an individual, with a unique expression and identity that transcends the historical dehumanization. In the series, every person is given their own portrait, mounted in an oval passe-partout—a format that recalls the early 1900s practice of framing individual portraits in photography studios. Through this gesture, Kaabi-Linke provides a reclamation of personal identity, offering a dignified representation of each individual beyond the lens of colonialism and exploitation.

2-Dimensional

Media
Digital prints taken from the drum scan of an archival film on archival paper

Dimension
25,8 × 22,8 cm (each of 32)

Exhibitions
Museum Reinickendorf, Berlin
Musée d’art et d’histoire Paul Éluard, Paris
SCAD – Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia
Karachi Video Art Festival
Kalmar Konstmuseum
Galerie Wedding, Berlin
Mosaic Rooms, London

Link
Faces. Galerie Wedding

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Faces, 2014
Media, politics, and ideology may play a massive role in making things visible or invisible. When is an individual’s personality made visible, and when and how can she be deliberately made invisible? Faces and portraits are two very distinguished things. The portrait is a reproduction of the face, while the face is the point of access to a person’s character. Portraits may represent a character’s traits, yet they do not grant direct access to the depicted person in real; they are products of intentions and interpretations.
The starting point for the project Faces was this archival photograph showing a group of South Africans, exotically dressed up and gathered in a way that one could not discern the individuality of each person. The image emphasized the factor of a group—instead of individuals—and the aura of savageness. Later we found that the collective was to feature as the main attraction of the Savage South Africa spectacle at the Greater Britain Exhibition at Earls Court in 1900.
We were thinking of turning around this situation of representation. In the early days of commercial photography, around 1900, it was still costly to develop a negative plate. Instead of taking expensive individual portraits, it was custom to take photographs of the whole family on a single plate, which could later be exposed multiple times, to grant every family member a personal portrait cut out of the group image. We treated the archival photograph like a family picture and rendered individual portraits from each person of the group. It was a method to reframe each character’s individuality, a process that later turned out to reveal some truth about the history of the original photograph.

Above is the staged photograph produced by Frank Fillis to promote the “Savage South Africa” spectacle. The image’s background shows that the photo was taken and developed on the sea to be ready for dispatch after arrival in the port of Southampton.
Below: The second stage photograph to promote the spectacle. The background shows Feszty’s Panorama painting of an imagined South African landscape.
We found both photographs in the archives under their marketing titles, “Chief And Group of Swazies” or “Chief of Zulus and His Warriors,” instead of the actual event, the “Savage South Africa” at the Greater Britain Exhibition in 1899.

Staged photograph with actors at the scene of Frank E. Fillis "Savage South Africa" Show in London Earls Court Exhibition in 1899

The Savage South Africa show was all in his interest. His reputation in London was heavily damaged. A few years before, he had made deals with the Matabele King Lobengula who granted him the right to dig for gold in the land of the Mashona. The land had everything that humans needed for subsistence, yet it was poor in mineral wealth. His next target was the land of the Matabele. He pushed the agreement with Lobengula to the edge and armed the Mashona to fight against their alleged oppressors, the Matabele, until he finally invaded the Matabele land with a band of gunmen and machine guns.

This marked the outbreak of the Zulu Wars in the 1890s, with many casualties and assassinations of pioneer farmers. While Rhodes did not exactly start the war himself, he did everything to end the peace that preceded it, of which the colonial secretary in London was well aware. Rhodes’ plan to rehabilitate his name in Europe was to show the public how dangerous the savage South African people were. Imre Kiralfy gave him the opportunity for this propaganda campaign and Frank Fillis delivered the spectacle.

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On the left is an adaptation of the portraiture
series for the Karachi Video Festival that
took place in the streets of during Karachi
during the Corona lockdown in Summer of 2020.