Alana Blignaut
Extending the genre of photographic portraiture to forensic imaging, Alana Blignaut's Mary, Recitation uses facial averaging techniques towards poetic ends. The digital video piece – an earlier version of which was shown at A4 as Desire for the Public (2018) – features the faces of South Africans deemed "known or suspected activists" by the apartheid-era Security Branch. As a restorative gesture, Blignaut's work, she writes, "embodies a desire to make archival facial imagery relating to traumatic historical events open to public consideration without revealing personal information of those imaged; and the interface as a historiographic intervention into the archive."
b.1992, Calvinia; works in Cape Town.