Jeu de Paume : Cahun and Mofokeng

The two photography exhibits currently at the musee of the Jeu de Paume deal with issues of memory and
identity.

Mofokeng claims to be looking for that which can not really be photographed, to be trying to photograph a shadow.
The first room delves into his beginning photographing workers on mass transit in South Africa. The shadow here is
perhaps what the commuters really want or are thinking. Perhaps they are the larger shadow in South African society as
well.
In the second room he photographs sacred places in Africa and other places in the world. The devote gather around
a cave to be blessed by water or smoke. There is a reflection on one side upon the equality between man and landscape.
On the other side of the room there are a photographs of landscape and caves which have been formed and damaged by
mining.
The new age lady and writer
( all of which are perhaps disqualifications for being a thinker) Marianne Williamson says that the most
sacred places on earth are those where a great evil has taken place but where that evil has turned into something positive. According to this logic a killing field made into a church would be especially sacred. In the third room of the exhibition Mofokeng doesnt make any new monuments, but he takes some nice picture of former mass graves in Namibia. The last room frankly left me a little unconvinced and uncomfortable, photos of Autchwitz torture chambers in an art gallery. Some wounds are perhaps best left raw for a bit longer. But maybe that is where the discussion is. Or maybe not. I dont know.

Cahun's major subject is herself and her refusal to accept the established norms for women in inter war Europe.
Cahun was a major part of the surrealist group in Paris after the first world war.
Starting with chopping off her hair and dressing as a man, she goes onto image herself as all of the images of exoticism
and the other which were rattling around and being oppressed in the collective imagination and society of early twentieth
century europe. She lays in a jungle/ garden like setting with leopard print. She creates human fingers out of misplaced objects, news paper papier mache. In the end she plays with the unnoticed corners of her own neighborhood photographing walls.