Interview with Nomusa Makhubu

Clare Counihan interviews Nomusa Makhubu about how her body of work—three series of photographs, Inquietude, Self-Portrait Project 2007/2013, and The Flood—fits into the context of contemporary, post-apartheid South African art. All three series suggest the uneasy relationship between present and past. Makhubu reflects on the impossibility of avoiding politics in South African art, photography's role in the invention of ethnicity in colonial southern Africa, and the practices of contemporary artists and artists' collectives in South Africa that are challenging conventional, sometimes elitist, modes of art as a (racialized) marketplace.