The Crow Messengers
A solo exhibition by Judith Westerveld
Long Gallery: 12.03.26 - 23.04.26
In the solo exhibition, The Crow Messengers, Judith Westerveld presents a body of work based on narratives told in the Southern African San languages |xam and !xun that form part of the Bleek and Lloyd Archive. A testament to the lives and cultural practices of |xam and !xun people, the archive also provides a unique and rare insight into the impact of the Dutch colonisation of South Africa. It is a collection of 13.000 pages of stories and interviews in notebooks, drawings, paintings and photographs of and by |xam and !xun people, collected by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in Cape Town, South Africa, in the 1870s and 1880s. Folklore and personal accounts were told to them in |xam by several men called |a!kunta, ||kabbo, ≠kasin, Dia!kwain and |han≠kass’o, as well as a woman called !kweiten ta ||ken, and in !xun by four young boys called !nanni, Tamme, |úma and Da.
In a series of artworks, Westerveld visualises ten narratives from the archive that detail how these narrators perceived and encountered the Dutch colonists ("the Boers") who threatened their lives, their way of living and their languages. Today |xam is no longer spoken, and !xun is marginalised, spoken by only a few communities in Southern Africa. The selected narratives are eyewitness accounts, as well as stories where fable and reality, dreams and visions, past and present intertwine, told in the narrators' own words and in their own languages. Through images, sound and text, Westerveld has created her own visual language to make the ten narratives visible and audible beyond their archival form in this exhibition. Engaging different media such as film, photocollages, prints, a sculptural installation, and an artist publication, Westerveld brings the ten narratives and the colonial history they harbour into the present, and offers a glimpse of the unique way in which the narrators saw the world.
This exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and DutchCulture. The artworks in this exhibition have been produced with the financial support.
