About the project

Aware that he belonged to one of the first South African generations that grew up during post-Apartheid, Jansen van Staden’s work questions tradition and trauma in his homeland. When he was 25 years old, his father died in a microlight accident. Years later he found a letter in his father’s estate addressed to a therapist about his experiences of war at the age of seventeen in the South African Border War. Experiences that followed him throughout his life, but that he at the same time had kept hidden from his family.

Shocked, but motivated, Jansen van Staden uses the brutality of the details in the letter as a starting point to re-examine the entanglement of the ideologies of apartheid, war and violence. This research, an act of retracing and re-enactment, deals with the acceptance and rejection of memory and love towards the father from a son carrying the consequences of his father’s actions.
The exhibition is sponsored by the BAT Foundation.