Pieter Hugos new photographic series Kin will show across both of Stevenson’s galleries, premiering in Johannesburg and opening two weeks later in Cape Town.

Kin is a bittersweet perspective on Hugo’s homeland of South Africa. It is a meditation on the ideals of home, both familial and humanistic. It explores the tenuous ties that both bind us to and repel us from others.

Over the past eight years Hugo has turned his eye on cramped townships, contested farmlands and abandoned mining areas; psychologically charged still lifes in people’s homes; sites of political significance; drifters and the homeless; his pregnant wife, and his daughter moments after her birth; the domestic servants who have worked for the Hugo family over three generations. The series alternates between intimate and public spaces, with particular emphasis on the growing disparity between rich and poor, and reveals Hugo’s deeply conflicted feelings about his home. It confronts complex issues of colonisation, racial diversity and economic disparity. Kin endeavours to locate his young family in a country with a fraught history and an uncertain future.

Pieter Hugo was born in 1976 in Johannesburg and grew up in Cape Town, where he lives. His survey exhibition, This Must Be the Place,  has showed at the Fotomuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Stimultania Photographic Centre, Strasbourg, France (2012); Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2013); and continues to tour. Some recent group exhibitions include  Present Tense,  Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal (2013); Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive,  The Walther Collection, Ulm, Germany (2013); Africa: Photographs and video from the Martin Margulies Collection,  Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, Edison State College, Florida, USA (2012); Africa, There and Back, Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany (2012); Qui Vive?  3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Russia (2012); FotoTriennale.dk, Funen, Denmark (2012); Contact Photography Festival, Toronto, Canada (2011); ARS 11, Kiasma, Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art, Finland (2011); Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, V&A Museum, London, UK (2011); The Eye is a Lonely Hunter: Images of Humankind, Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg, Germany (2011); and The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany (2011). Hugo won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2007; the KLM Paul Huf Award and the Arles Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival in 2008; the Seydou Keita Award at the 9th Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial, Mali, in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse photography prize in 2012.

The exhibition opens in Johannesburg on Thursday 3 October, 6 to 8pm, and runs until 8 November. It opens in Cape Town on Thursday 17 October, 6 to 8pm, and runs until 23 November.

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