Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Jetty SCOUR, suggests the physical markings left behind from a ships arrival and departure. Here is the present day ‘arrival’ of the “human-transporter”, a replicated 19th century cane-woven basket or ‘lift’ to a harbour in South Africa. The original would have been used off the coast of Algoa Bay in South Africa from 1890-1920 to lift colonial settlers to and from ships at sea before the development of harbours. Here the artist works with the object as historical witness, to engage with contested sites and legacies linked to the arrival of her own ancestors, a British settler family, to that same bay in 1820. The film, whilst documenting a contemporary working harbour within the economy of international trade, marks this space and place with historical encryptions, the smallest tensions, that refuse a “blanking out” of history.

Bridget Baker lives and works in London and Cape Town (b.1971, East London, South Africa). Her work is situated at the intersection of documentary and myth creation, forming a series of complex visual fragments realised through filmmaking, installation and performed re-stagings. Baker’s practise and visual language, whilst based on in-depth research into personal and public modes of representation within colonial and postcolonial narratives remains characteristically speculative, nomadic and estranging. Occupying the realm of the imaginary, the characters in her films, installations and photographs are spliced into roles as presences / witnesses / mirrors that enact lost memory within those peripheral places blind spotted by “official” history making.