Francki Burger Belonging

Exhibition Catalogue, The Brait-Everard Read Art Award 2008, softcover, illustrated, 40 pages, 20.5 cms x 25 cms, condition: new.

The Brait-Everard Read Art Award presented to Francki Burger in 2008 for her photographic collages and other pieces of Magersfontein.

"My work investigates landscape and history and how politics, race and violence are embedded/layered within the landscape. Historically, landscape in South Africa acted as a symbol of intimacy, a layered network of meanings and a place where cultural identity could be inscribed and imagined. 

I am particularly interested in the role of the photographer in documenting the landscape. I examine archival images taken by official and amateur photographers of various battlefields as I believe that traces are still present on the landscape, a landscape littered with political ideologies that inform our identities. This view regards landscape conceptually, as a space of shifts and changes, rather than physically.

 I re-photograph and layer archival and present-day landscapes in the darkroom, which results in a black and white photograph that reveals the way in which the landscape accumulates history and memory. I become an observer of past and present landscapes, merging them to construct a new document. This stems from an archaeological desire to scratch the surface of the soil for traces in the landscape, which might act as a crucial marker through which one investigates the past and negotiates the future."