Acts of Witness: Photographs of Spatial Apartheid

Join us for a lecture celebrating the opening of the exhibition David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive with the South African architect and scholar Ilze Wolff, Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York. Goldblatt’s pictures offer key and focused views on spatial apartheid in South Africa. This lecture looks behind, above, below, and beside Goldblatt’s lens to describe the broad territory of social imaginaries that accompany his images. In other words, if Goldblatt’s photographs bear witness to the violence of spatial injustice, what are the constructions that then give contexts to these images, images which in themselves become acts of witness? Generously sponsored by Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979, and the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund. 

This lecture accompanies a preview of and opening reception for the exhibition David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive. Exhibition co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery, in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.