In conversation with Francisco Berzunza, the curator of You to Me, Me to You, Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo revisits his archive towards a new, large-scale arrangement of his photographs, which draws images from disparate essays into proximity. Pairing black-and-white photographs with a colour triptych, and framed works with wheat-pasted reproductions, the arrangement extends reflections on the artist's projects and processes; his documentary enquiries and more affective experiments in abstraction. Of the latter, Thembinkosi says:
"I had begun trying to confront my childhood memories of the tavern and how it affected me. This is a tavern my family runs still, in the deep south of Johannesburg. The tavern always had interesting marks. From the marks, you could tell what was happening the previous night.
Because of the violence, the community called the tavern Slaghuis (slaughterhouse). My process was informed by the word 'slaghuis', the violence in it.
So I became violent with the image. I would also take images and put them back into the tavern, for the images to act as (recording) surfaces in the space.
There’s something empowering about going back to a space that caused you harm and that you wanted to escape from. Having a conversation with that space and taking your power back from it."
– Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, You to Me, Me to You wayfinder