Simon Njami Knihy

Jane Alexander is one of the most significant African contemporary artists working today. Her animal-human sculptures, photographs, and dramatic installations speak of lasting disfigurations in her native South Africa, yet raise issues about human nature that resonate with viewers internationally. Alexander's hybrid mutants inhabit a universe where boundaries between self and other, human and animal, are unstable, where shared foundations and clashing differences are disclosed, and where the grotesque and the familiar entwine. While the figures are, in many ways, emblems of monstrosity, they are oddly beautiful. Her creatures expose the human animal for all it is and all it could become. Not only are Alexander's artworks formally and technically accomplished, but they also deliver a potent emotional impact, sending warnings about historical consequences and hinting at things to come.

Through an ambitious and probing theme based around conflict the Sixteenth Noorderlicht International Photofestival invited five guest curators to reveal their personal vision on this subject. The curators, Stuart Franklin, Lauren Heinz, Simon Njami, Marc Prüst, and Bas Vroege take the reader with them on a photographic journey to different areas of conflict, while also providing a commentary on recent developments in the vanguard of engaged, narrative documentary photography.

Somewhere between realism and metaphor, humanity and bestiality, South Africa and the rest of the world, Jane Alexander's sculptures give shape to the brutal, painful, tragic, bizarre, incomprehensible, and fragile existence of her multicultural society--and, to a lesser extent, others. Existening in a no-man's-land where the difference between victim and perpetrator is blurred and meaningless, her life-size figures, made from fiberglass, wood, clay, and found objects, sometimes dressed as people do, sometimes naked as people and animals are, are uncanny in their astonishing naturalism, a naturalism thwarted by bandages, animal masks, incomprehending animal eyes, and violent lacerations. This is the first extensive publication dedicated to Alexander's work.