Gallery Opening Speech by Mr. Brent Meistre

​About two months ago Paul gingerly entered my office, after me not having seen him for a week or two. He look rather weather beaten, sunburnt and was visibly struggling to move from muscular pain.

He had just completed digging a grave in Mayfield cemetery outside of Grahamstown East, Plot number EA 61. The process took Paul four days, from dawn till dusk, to complete.

​

It was a significant moment for this body of work – as it signified an end point, a resolution and intimate gesture towards restitution - as Paul personally buried a pauper who had lain unclaimed for over a year in the Grahamstown mortuary.

Whilst this was his enactment of our most basic funerary ritual; rich, varied and sometimes seemingly idiosyncratic traditions around death and mourning occur across the world. Locally, in isiXhosa and many other cultures in Southern Africa, it is customary as the sibling of a deceased twin, to lie down in the grave of your sibling, a gesture of connectedness and attachment. Acknowledgement that a part of oneself has been lost.

​

In traditional Greek culture it is still customary to exhume the remains of the dead after each year, to clean and care for the bones and wash the headstone– it’s a gesture of deep and compassionate love for the deceased, again an intimate  acknowledgement that one is still connected to the deceased in a very real and tangible way.

​

While funerary or memorialising rituals exist as fundamental to most cultures, Paul’s work shows us in a subtle nuanced way that in our context in South Africa our poorest are not always afforded such rights. The works you see here this evening are the result of his very long, empathetic concern and connectedness to the marginalised, the poor and particularly deceased paupers. Those who may be without family, or perhaps whose families cannot afford the burial, or who simply remain unclaimed by their communities or extended families. 

​

It is our final ‘rite of passage’ – to be buried and to be remembered, to be laid to rest back into the lay of the land. This body of work is as much about the disintegration of social structures and the greater understanding of family and community as it is about the state’s role of guardianship over the deceased. But it is more than that – it is about the process we use to memorialise: a name on a headstone, a flower on grave, a small piece of demarcated landscape where we go to remember. It is also about the pain of loss, the unsaid and the unsayable, about the gaps between memory and the undeniable certainty that we will be placed back into the terra firma.

​

Paul has spent many months in and out of funeral homes and mortuaries, navigating intimate hours with the deceased, struggling to unravel the problematic of representation - without the grotesque and abject sensationalising nuanced and complex issues. To represent and allow for these complexities to emerge in a way that is ethical, sensitive and respectful.  By looking at the trace and detritus, the document, and the bureaucratic processes and protocols of dealing with death, these complexities have begun to reveal themselves.

​

Paul is what documentary photographers would call – “a concerned photographer” – tormented and frustrated by the camera, by the all-seeing eye that over-articulates and records in full detail.  The camera embellishes, it can make the grotesque and abject beautiful. But it can also allow for a poetic and metaphoric discourse to emerge, a discourse that articulates in its own language beyond what we may be able to murmur verbally.  And that is the power of the images that are on display here this evening.

I would like to congratulate you Paul on a very brave and unwavering commitment to the image and to your subjects.

I would like to end off by recalling this powerful thought by the Jewish Frankfurt School philosopher, Walter Benjamin who in 1955 in his Theses on the Philosophy of History proclaimed

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Thank you.