The-Stronger-We-Become-Catalogue

Opacity
Providing the contextualising note for this exhibition, Gabi Ngcobo draws our attention to how murky
and impenetrable our socio-economic politics are. She draws attention to subterfuge. As she
expertly states, ‘to apply opacity as a strategy for making things differently clear is a way of owning
the right to non-imperative clarities. It is a commitment towards the rearrangement of systems for the
creation of new knowledge, a way of distributing responsibility for the historical process of unravelling ‘the
problems we didn’t create’.
This essay, much like the exhibition itself is not trying to deliver a text that will be easy to consume and give
specific answers to questions or pin down one definition for the exhibition. In a way it is a very selfish way
to try and work out and unpack what we have said and done. The generosity, of this selfish gesture is that
it takes you along with us in working out the explication. We have raised more questions than we can be
hope to answer. We may well have asked how are social disparities mediated? How are oppressive
regimes overcome? How do we deal South Africa’s shortcomings in the face of the state’s monopolization
of the means of violence and increasingly anti-black responses to calls for equitable distribution of
resources and change? Opacity becomes, for us, a way to navigate the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of post-1994
South Africa.
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