Complex, vivid, evocative, and dramatic, « Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life » represents the most comprehensive exhibition of its kind, attempting to formulate an understanding of apartheid’s legacy in South Africa through visual records. These images responded to the procedures and processes of the apartheid state from its beginning in 1948 to the first non-racial democratic elections that attended its demise in 1994.

Featuring more than 600 documentary photographs, artworks, films, newsreel footage, books, magazines, and assorted archival documents, the exhibition will fill more than 2,000 square meters of the East Wing of Haus der Kunst.  Starting in the entrance gallery (where two film clips are juxtaposed; one from 1948 showing the victorious Afrikaner National Party’s celebration rally, and another of President F.W. De Klerk in February 1990 announcing Nelson Mandela’s release from prison) the exhibition offers an absorbing exploration of one of the twentieth century’s most contentious historical eras. The exhibition highlights the different strategies adopted by photographers and artists; from social documentary to reportage, photo essays to artistic appropriation of press and archival material. Through these polysemic images, the exhibition embarks on a tour of how photographers and artists think with pictures, the questions these images pose, and the issues of social justice, resistance, civil rights and the actions of opposition to apartheid raise. In so doing, « Rise and Fall of Apartheid » brings together many iconic photographs that have rarely been shown before, to propose a fresh historical overview of the photographic and artistic responses to apartheid. The exhibition is curated by Okwui Ewenzor with Rory Bester and was organized by the International Center of Photography in New York in collaboration with Haus der Kunst.

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