PROMISES & LIES | THE ANC, EXILE & THE PROJECT OF FREEDOM
Taken by award-winning British photographer Laurie Sparham, and presented by curator and filmmaker Dr Siona O’Connell, the photographs in this exhibition chronicle the experience of ANC exiles living in Tanzania and Zambia from 1989-1990. Accompanied by a new and provocative documentary by O’Connell, likewise titled Promises & Lies – The ANC, Exile & the Project of Freedom, the exhibition offers viewers a chance to consider the personal and familial sacrifices of political exile, the promise of freedom that was its aspiration, and these in relation to a current landscape of crisis and failure in which we, as ‘new South Africans’, find ourselves complicit. The images compel us to think about links and traces, aspirations and accountability – and, in the interests of an as-of-yet unrealised freedom, difficult questions we must ask of history and its resonances in the present.