Investec Cape Town Art Faiir 2022

Deepest Darkest Art, a Cape Town-based gallery, will be showing two projects by lens-based artist Barry Salzman at Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF), to be held at the Cape Town International Convention Center, February 18th - 20th, 2022.

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Salzman, born in Zimbabwe and schooled in South Africa, developed a fascination with photography as a teenager, when it served as a way to grapple with racial segregation in apartheid South Africa.  Today, his work continues to explore challenging themes around social, political and economic narratives. Acutely relevant, and brave in its willingness to confront, Salzman’s photography garnered an International Photographer of the Year Award in 2018 from the International Photography Awards (IPA) for his project, The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim. This project is a series of one-hundred posthumous portraits of victims of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as represented by the clothes they were wearing on the last day of their lives.

In 2018 Salzman was in Rwanda working on his landscape project, How We See The World, when news broke about a mass grave that had just been discovered in Kabuga Village, on the outskirts of Kigali (almost twenty-five years after the genocide). Upon arriving at the excavation site, Salzman was emotionally troubled by the piles of crumpled clothes and rags recovered from the earth. “They seemed to compound the dehumanising way the victims’ lives had been truncated,” he explained. “I felt compelled to separate the items and photograph them as individual portraits. As each piece was carefully laid out, still damp from the earth, I found myself imagining that person’s story.”  Deepest Darkest Art will be premiering The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim at ICTAF 2022, making it the the first time ever that the project has been exhibited in its entirety.  

In parallel with The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim the gallery willl also be exhibiting select works from Salzman’s ongoing landscape project, How We See The World, all made within witness distance of sites of twentieth-century genocide.  In this body of work Salzman uses the landscape metaphorically to draw connections between each of these disparate and dark moments in modern history, while suggesting that in fact it is we, members of an amorphous humanity, who form the true connective tissue between them.

The works on show at ICTAF 2022 are drawn from the artist’s work in Namibia and Rwanda.  Namibia was the site of the first genocide of the twentieth century, where the German occupiers of then South West Africa developed and tested concentration camps, which they brutally deployed against the Herero and Nama population from 1904-1908.  And in 1994 in Rwanda almost one million people were killed in 100 days -- there is no landscape anywhere in that small country that did not bear witness to those atrocities.

In Salzman’s large scale landscapes he abandons a traditional documentary treatment in favour of a more abstract approach reflecting his intent for the pictures to be a counterpoint to the way information on this topic is typically disseminated.  Salzman says of his intricately layered landscapes, all made in a single exposure with no composting in post-production, “In these works, I am preoccupied with making aesthetic images as opposed to documenting brutal facts. That has been done by professionals much more qualified than I. But by creating images, my hope is to give viewers the space to interpret the work in their own way.”

Barry Salzman lives between Cape Town and New York City. His projects have been shown across the globe and his work is widely published.  He has an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from The School of Visual Arts in New York City, a Bachelor of Business Science degree from the University of Cape Town, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.