The Aftermath of Conflict

Jo Ractliffe’s Photographs of Angola and South Africa

Throughout her career, South African photographer Jo Ractliffe (born 1961) has directed her camera toward landscapes to address themes of displacement, conflict, history, memory, and erasure. This exhibition brings together selected works from three of her recent photographic series that focus on the aftermath of the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002) and its relationship with the Border War (1966–89) fought by South Africans in Angola and present-day Namibia. For Ractliffe and many other South African civilians, Angola during these wars was an abstract place, a “secret, unspoken location where brothers and boyfriends were sent as part of their military service.” When seen consecutively, these three series reveal Ractliffe’s deepening engagement with the region’s complex histories as an attempt to “retrieve a place for memory.”

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