Durban’s beachfront gets pride of place at the KZNSA with the opening yesterday of a photographic exhibition and videographic installation eBhish’ (At the Beach) from artist, curator, filmmaker and researcher Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose.
For Durban-born Nyawose, it’s his first solo exhibition in the city, and today he will host a walk-around at the gallery from 10am.
Regarding eBhish’ he remembers summers as the highlight of the year. “My family and I would drive to the beach in a car packed to the brim with camp chairs, cooler boxes and treats. As kids, we would sing gleefully, ‘eBhish’ Durban, ebhish’, bhish’, bhish’, Durban!’ This excitement reverberated with crowds of other kids who would splash about the public pools,” he said.
Such was the excitement, he would often swim for hours until his mother or grandmother would drag him out of the pool.
For Nyawose, the city’s beachfront holds personal, and political, significance.
“The history of black people’s relationship with the space has largely been marked by discrimination and segregation. Our absence in visual archives reflects this, as they are largely populated by historical photographs of white beachgoers.
“The past is not a time that is over,” he says. “It is a historical force that produces our now. It is important, therefore, to address the invisibility of black leisure in public spaces. Through my work, I’m contributing to a contemporary archive of black life ebhish’, one with humanising, tender and intimate moments, aimed at inscribing our place in the seaside eThekwini.”
His parents and grandparents had experienced that discrimination, using areas designated for black beach goers.
“When the beaches desegregated, like most families, they enjoyed sections they were once barred from. By the time my siblings, cousins and I were born, trips to the beach during the summer school holidays were the pinnacle of the year. Our parents and grandparents would often watch over us as kids. As my older cousins have their own children, they are introduced to what has become somewhat of a ‘tradition’,” he says.
Nyawose’s interest in photography peaked from a young age, beginning at home with family albums.
“As I grew up, I became increasingly curious about image-making and was granted permission to use my parent’s point-and-shoot camera, often used to archive those beach experiences. By the time I entered formal schooling, I had been fully immersed in photography at home.”
He says the camera was something that “gave to black folks, irrespective of class, a means by which we could participate fully in the production of images”. It was a photograph of himself, taken by his father, wearing bright orange swim shorts in 1998 that sparked the exhibition. “From an early age, I have been documenting (and have been documented in) intimate histories and articulations of community from our perspectives,” he says.
Started in 2018, eBhish’ uses “my personal experience to describe, analyse and understand cultural experience. It is through my lived experiences that I began an auto-ethnographic approach of photographic documentation. Through an embodied (rather than technical) practice, I swam and immersed myself in the beach crowds.”
His use of 35mm and 120mm film for black and white photography helps evade a fixed reading of time. In addition many of his aerial shots were filmed with a DJI Mini SE Drone
“The beachfront for me quite beautifully shows notions of temporality,” he says. “Through seeing kids I was able to revisit the rich memories of my childhood of the summertime in water but also remembered quite vividly being scared of the ocean. I was transported back to the awkward teenage years when you were so uncomfortable in your own body and then later gained confidence through adulthood. I was able to see tender moments of fatherhood, of mothering and grandparenting. For me, all of these moments warm me up to the possibilities of the future.”
The exhibition runs until February 27.
