This exhibition is the culmination of the New Delhi edition of Sue Williamson’s ‘Other Voices, Other Cities,’ a ten day long collaborative process initiated by the artist with a group of young artists from the city based on their reflections on the city, working from a makeshift studio in the gallery.

In this age of globalization, what does it mean to live in particular place? Why do the residents of a city choose to live there, and if there is one message that would express the essence of that city, what would it be? This is the question South African artist Sue Williamson has been exploring for the past three years, in an ongoing series entitled ‘Other Voices, Other Cities’.

In each new city, Williamson works by setting up a workshop of young artists and other residents, and asking them talk about what distinguishes their city and the people of that city from any other. What is good, what is bad, what is peculiar? If the city has an image and an attitude what is it? At the end of the workshop, participants vote on the most popular statement.

At a time when most of the world is frankly in a mess, the dialogue created by the residents of the different cities is engaging and revealing. Cities in the series so far are Havana, Johannesburg, London, Bern, Berlin, New York, Krakow, Naples, Istanbul and Hong Kong. Other cities like Beirut are in the planning.

Sue Williamson’s ‘Other Voices, Other Cities’ is a project that was born in the face of several odds. At the Havana Biennale in 2009 — within a precarious, insular, socio-political context shaped by economic blockade and meager resources — the artist collected testimonies from a local fishing community, hoping to voice their concerns and grievances in public spaces. Censorship was certain. The local authorities attempted to contain her letters, cut out in forms dictated by the people, within controlled interior spaces. The antagonism led to the subversive act of temporarily, at times covertly, propping up telling statements in public spaces to which they relate, so that they can remain permanently in the enduring memory of a photograph. If a group of people were to alert the world to one statement about their condition at a particular moment in a particular place to which they belong, what would it be? It could be a warning, experience, confession, or testimony.

In Delhi, the fourteenth city to partake in this exercise, the artist’s notes from hours of reflection with a group of local residents similarly resonate an extraordinary moment at the confluence of history, memory, witnessing, acceptance and denial. In a city that has witnessed the rise and fall of empires time and time again, built almost entirely from immigrants, and is now the seat of power, how can we all live together? The statement does not pretend empathy, except in the mutual ‘unknowability’ of each other’s experience. Almost as if whispering tenderly to a living, breathing organism — perhaps even a lover — the group acknowledged their relationship to the complex web of material and immaterial relations in the city: “Delhi, we know you but we don’t know you.” It is only by confessing the impossibility of placing oneself in another’s shoes — however familiar they may seem — can there be generative conversation. Silently, the subtext lingers: “Please tell me, I am willing to listen.”

The space that the group, along with Williamson chose to contextualize their statement further amplifies the city’s resilience amid even the unfavorable destinies that it has been endowed. In the New Delhi Railway Station area, where throngs enter and leave everyday, peppered with impermanent shanty rooftop shelters, one-night cheap hotels and small, family-run shops that have been around for decades, the statement is a melancholy embrace of all that we can possibly know in this permanently fragile, permanently transient eco-system, along with its strangers — for we are all strangers to someone — whose stories cannot be fully comprehended. Looming in the background is an unkempt mosque; the foreground projects a bright propaganda poster from a local right- wing political party leader in the event of a Hindu festival. Seemingly oblivious to both, crowds consumed by their everyday lives float through the lens of the camera, while for a minute or two, traffic stalls patiently for the group to perform their temporary occupation of the streets. Through the conversations at the workshop, the consensus pointed towards a question: Delhi, who are you? Can any of us really claim to know this complicated, confusing organism that is full of contradictions? Can we claim to know each other’s encounters with the city despite having worked together closely for a few days? From the oxymoronic statement encapsulating intimacy and estrangement, a third possibility emerges Hope.

The two-channel video, It’s a pleasure to meet you contextualizes the series with the rest of Williamson’s practice. From her post-apartheid context in South Africa, she has been probing the process of reconciliation. Her work observes the weight of historical error, and consequent personal and generational trauma. From a vantage point of deep awareness, in It’s a pleasure to meet you she creates a space for the process of narrativizing unthinkable horror and silence. From collective testimonies in ‘Other Voices, Other Cities’, we move to intersubjective, cathartic re-telling through a conversation between Candice Mama and Siyah Mgoduka, who share stories about their fathers who were killed by apartheid assassins. The camera is once again a witness, receiving the memory of their encounter.

Sue Williamson

Sue Williamson was born in Lichfield, England in 1941. In 1948 she immigrated with her family to South Africa. Between 1963 and 1965 she studied at the Art Students League of New York. In 1983 she earned her Advanced Diploma in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape TowIn 2007 she received a Visual Arts Research Award from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C and in 2011, a Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2013 she was a guest curator of the Summer Academy at the Paul Klee Museum in Bern.

Williamson's work engages with themes related to memory and identity formation. Trained as a printmaker, Williamson has worked across a variety of media including archival photography, video, mixed media installations, and constructed objects. Her earlier work, such as Mementoes of District Six (1993), Out of the Ashes (1994), and R.I.P. Annie Silinga (1995), are a few early examples that convey her investment in the recuperation and interrogation of South African history.

Williamson's ethical lens has expanded in more recent years to consider social issues on a more global scale, as in her work Other Voices, Other Cities, from 2009. Works from this series are in the Museum of the 21st Century, Louisville, Kentucky, and have been featured in a solo show at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia.

The Delhi edition of the work is the 14th in the series.

Her work is included in many international public collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern and the V&A Museums in London, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

She is also known for her writing on contemporary art, and is the author of Resistance Art inSouth Africa and South African Art Now. In 1997 she became founding editor of the website, an online journal on contemporary art in Africa, ArtThrob.

Her own work is documented in the SKIRA publication, Sue Williamson: Life and Work.

abr, named after the Urdu word for cloud, is an alliance of cultural practitioners coming together over shared vulnerabilities, to create a circle of care, communality, and conviviality in these uncertain and difficult times. As we register the detrimental fallout from the Covid-19 crisis within our proximate circles and beyond, it feels vital to find ways to come together, to witness these critical times, to link our homes, our solitudes, our labours, and most importantly to have each other’s backs. As a response, abr has created a network of support by commissioning short performances or digital works from artists and performers who have recently seen a shrinkage in opportunities for commissions, collaboration, feedback and presentation.