Cape Town’s Iziko Slave Lodge
Until February this year, I had not set foot in the Iziko Slave Lodge at the top of Cape Town’s Adderley Street since it changed its name from the Cultural History Museum a few years ago. Then director Lalou Meltzer invited me to show my video installation work, There’s something I must tell you in the Slave Lodge in June.
The Slave Lodge is the second oldest colonial building in South Africa, and once housed the slaves the Dutch settlers brought in to work in the V.O.C, vegetable gardens. Van Riebeeck shot his first hippo in the swamp where Church Square, diagonally opposite the museum, now stands.
What I remembered best from an earlier visit to the museum years ago was a reconstruction of a Victorian chemist’s shop in one corner of an upper gallery. And some old china.
Well, the chemist’s shop is still there. But the Slave Lodge changed its curatorial policy as well as its name, so that today the contemporary sits alongside the historical artefacts and the videos telling of the importation of the slaves.
Siemon Allen’s ‘Labels’ at the Slave Lodge
Amongst the contemporary art exhibitions are Siemon Allen’s ‘Labels’: scans of thousands of record labels documenting the history of South African music hanging in curving curtains upstairs. And Keith Dietrich’s ‘Fragile Histories’, portraits of local people with immaculately folded text laden tracing paper rosettes can be found in another gallery.
On the ground floor. my exhibition of work on women in the struggle over a period of thirty years, ‘There’s something I must tell you’, occupies five galleries.
‘There’s something I must tell you’ (installation view)
The concept is for visitors to view the rooms of portraits of women, etched, photographed and videoed, and perhaps to reflect again on the histories of their own families.
The room for writing.
In one room there are painted ‘pages’ on the walls, blank or lined, with the invitation, ‘remembering our grandmothers’. Stairs and a hanging pen provide access. People started writing from the first moments of the opening.
