Rhodes University's Fine Art Masters student, Xanthe Geyer, opens her upcoming exhibition entitled Vergenoeg on 2 December 2009. The exhibition will be held for one night only at the Gallery in the Round, in The Monument, Grahamstown, and will be opened by Department of Fine Art senior lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture, Dr Ahsraf Jamal, at 17h30.

Vergenoeg showcases family photographs as material representations of personal histories. Geyer reworks and reproduces old sentimental photographs of family members that lived on the farm Vergenoeg in the 1930s.

She attempts to unravel the ways in which stories are produced and memories are created by the viewers. The exhibition entails an investigative process as the narrative and fictional aspects of memory are explored. In doing so, Geyer has extended the conventional boundaries of the photographic image, combining it with other media, surfaces and even sculptural form to create a dynamic relationship between images, objects, textures, sounds and the actual memories and stories in the minds of her viewers. Vergenoeg thus allows the viewer the opportunity of entering a constructed space, a time-capsule of sorts, one that contains memories of a time that has passed yet has been reconfigured through visual means allowing for the projection of one’s own imagination.

Xanthe Geyer grew up on a farm near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape and completed her undergraduate BFA degree at Rhodes University in 2007. This exhibition is her submission for her Master of Fine Art degree, a culmination of two years of thematically and conceptually focussed work. The final installation includes reconstituted found family photographs and objects into three-dimensional memory boxes, salt prints on fabric, sandwich prints and video forming an evocative memory vault.

Dr Ashraf Jamal has for the past decade, worked as a cultural analyst, art critic and painter, playwright and theatre director, novelist and short story writer.

He was awarded the Canadian New Brunswick Writer's Federation Prize for his play, Uncle Sky Takes His Yoyo To the Prairie. His play, Severance, was selected for the FNB Vita Award and his novel, Love Themes for the Wilderness, was selected for the MNET Book prize and has since been translated into German. He has also authored one of the TAXI Art Book monograph series on celebrated South African artist Lien Botha.

He has recently published Predicaments of Culture in South Africa, and co-authored Indian Ocean Studies to be release at the end of this year.