'Representing Difficult Pasts within Complex Presents ... - T2M

the Gold Reef City Complex as a whole… the Apartheid Museum is one of a range of attractions…. For
those investing large money in the new entertainment business, reliving apartheid is another legitimate
experience, an attraction, not quite a snuff movie, but in the same league’ (Hall and Bombardella 2005).
For others, it is a successful and powerful reminder of a recent past and its exhibition methods succeed in
conveying a traumatic and exploitative past (Ranking and Schmidt 2009).
The museum, according to curator (Education and Exhibitions Consultant) Emilia Potenza,
depicts the more the overriding ‘grand narrative’ of apartheid, including the history of resistance, rather
than the individualized and ‘community’ experience of the District Six Museum 37 . In relation to vehicles,
the museum contained ‘Mandela’s car’, created for him by transport workers after his release, and a type
of vehicle not present in the James Hall Museum - a kaspir – representing an ominous feature of the
apartheid past, which one could climb inside and look out from, to create a sense of understanding of
apartheid surveillance and control.
Two of the most successful exhibits of the Apartheid Museum, according to the curator Emilia
Potenza in interview, were two displays where embodied experience played a major factor. As previously
mentioned, the museum integrated architecture and design to create separate ‘black’ and ‘white’
exhibition entrances, claimed by some to act as a bodily destabilizing experience, mimicking experiences
of control, oppression, surveillance, segregation and liberation in its efforts to convey the experience of
apartheid in the past (Rankin and Schmidt 2009). The second was a room that represented those who died
from hanging, convicted as a result of apartheid resistance – an installation of hangman’s ropes- one for
every person who died. Of note, according to the curator, was the effectiveness of the embodied
experience of actually standing in the presence of an installation, or the body being made to move in
certain ways.
Discussion – A Plurality of Representations?
26
Transport and mobility as an exhibition theme suggest an in-between state, somewhere between
artefact and movement. If one were to move away from merely depicting vehicles as objects to instead
explore the thicker contextual world/s people moved – and in many cases, continue to move – within, in
relation to the establishment of networks, divisions, linkages, access and non-mobilities, to unpack the
spaces in-between ‘here’ and ‘there’, maybe there is an opportunity to interrogate, even break down, some
of the constructedness of divided identities and communities in South Africa. Certainly, on an
37 There are some memory boxes at the entrance, but the Apartheid museum focuses less on community and
people stories overall, nothing like the scale of District Six museum.