infoFor most of it I have no words by Simon Norfolk
Friday 18 June 1999 to Sunday 8 August 1999
Faced with the loss of almost all their traditional land, in 1904 the nomadic Herero rose against German colonial rule in South West Africa. Defeated, the surviving men, women and children were herded into the vast and waterless Omaheke Desert. 80% of the Herero people died in this largely forgotten act of genocide.
Simon Norfolk's harrowing exhibition is a catalogue of twentieth century sites of atrocity. It begins with Rwanda (1994), partially clad skeletons and violated refuges still bearing witness to the individual lives and deaths, and travels back.
Cambodia, 1975, Pol Pot's Year Zero. Vietnam, the free bombing zones developed from 1962; the use of the defoliant, Agent Orange. Auschwitz, the development of an extermination camp for Jews, the Romani, homosexuals, Russians, Poles and German criminals. The bombing of Dresden, where in one night in 1944 up to 40,000 civilians died for next to no tactical reason. The Ukraine, where between 1932 and 1933 up to 6 million died in Stalin's deliberate starvation of the population. Armenia, 1915: as Hitler himself asked 25 years later: Who now remembers the Armenians?
Gradually, as Norfolk takes us back to Von Trotha's near-extermination of the Herero, the marks of atrocity disappear from the landscape, their very absence challenging us to remember the tracks and the tears now covered by sand in his hauntingly beautiful images of Namibia's Omaheke Desert.
An Impressions Gallery touring exhibition
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