Drain on Our Dignity: book and exhibition launch

Masixole Feni will present his portfolio from the 2015 Ernest Cole Award

|
Photo of toilet in a flooded road
Photo: Masixole Feni

Masixole Feni, the winner of the Ernest Cole Award, 2015 for his project ā€“ A Drain on Our Dignity, will launch his book and exhibition on 3Ā AugustĀ 2017 at the Centre for African StudiesĀ (CAS) Gallery, University of Cape Town (UCT).

Feni, a photographer who has worked for GroundUpĀ documenting social issues inĀ Cape Town, won the award for focusing his camera on the lack of service delivery and the life of the marginalised. As he says, ā€œI live at the back of an RDP house in Mfuleni on the Cape Flats. I experience issues like poor sanitation, access to clean water and the flooding first handā€.

Sixty years after the anniversary of the Freedom Charter which campaigned for basic human rights, one person, one vote as well South Africaā€™s democracy, many South Africans still find themselves struggling for basic living conditions. As Feni points out,ā€Marginalised people were neglected by the apartheid regime. Twenty three years into our democracy, it is a reality that has stayed the same for many.ā€

Feniā€™s work echoes the groundbreaking images produced by Ernest Cole in the early 1960s showing black life under apartheid. The book called House of Bondage, published in exile and immediately banned, reflected on the lives of the marginalized and the poor and became a universal reference point for anyone who wanted to know more about the apartheid system.

Feni travelled throughout the local townships to explore life from this perspective and develop a book and exhibition. Observing Feniā€™s work, spatial researcher, architect, Ilze Wolff, who wrote the introduction to the book notes, ā€œHis visualisation of inequality, structural violence and his own imaginative response through photography is in itself a reflection on human creativity despite the limits put forward by power.ā€

For Feni living in the margins of Cape Town make him angry. ā€œā€˜Every day we read about peopleā€™s anger and frustration but we donā€™t get to see the other side.ā€ But for Feni his work transcends the mere record of this life to show the resilience of people who make a dignified life under difficult and unjust conditions.

The bookĀ A Drain on Our Dignity is published by Jacana Media.

A Drain on Our Dignity will show at the:

  • CAS Gallery 3-29 August
  • KZNSA Gallery, 5-28 September
  • WAM, 28th October, 2017 ā€“ 28th February 2018

For more information please contact - Paul Weinberg, co-ordinator, Ernest Cole Award. Paul.Weinberg@uct.ac.za 021 650 5251

See also:Ā http://www.ernestcoleaward.uct.ac.za

FeniĀ oftenĀ publishesĀ photo essays onĀ GroundUp.Ā 

TOPICS:  Arts and culture

Next:  Ocean View forms human chain to highlight crime problem

Previous:  Khayelitsha occupiers say they wonā€™t back down

© 2017 GroundUp. Creative Commons License
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.