NYAB Event - Cedric Nunn “Unsettled: One Hundred Years War of Resistance by Xhosa Against Boer and British”

Cedric Nunn “Unsettled: One Hundred Years War of Resistance by Xhosa Against Boer and British”

David Krut Projects

This event has ended.

Unsettled: One Hundred Years War of Resistance by Xhosa Against Boer and British is an exhibition by acclaimed South African photographer Cedric Nunn. The exhibition will be exhibited across three locations in the US: David Krut Projects, NY, Wheaton College, MA and Rhode Island School of Design, RI. Nunn, who is best known for his photographs taken during apartheid, aims to instigate social change and highlight lesser seen aspects of society with his photography.

The exhibition deals with the nine wars that Xhosa people were subjected to between 1779 and 1879 in their fight against Afrikaner and British colonial settler forces. Nunn became aware of a notable gap in the telling of this South African history, as well as the fact that little has been done to date to memorialise these acts of colonial aggression and Xhosa resistance, and decided to document the land where these struggles took place.

“This essay looks at the land, which was occupied, desired, defended, lost and won. In it we see both the uses and states it is to be found in today, both by the victors and the vanquished. We are able to imagine the heroism and the misery it inflicted on its actors as they either defended or attacked. We see, too, how little of this memory is commemorated or honoured”, says Nunn. “We see the smug conquerors, and the conquered. We see the continuing collaborations, which have always been necessary to maintain the status quo. We see the beauty, which stirred the souls of the inhabitants and the lust of the invaders.

“Through revisiting this painful past in the contemporary scenes of today, this work attempts to place the present in its factual context of dispossession and conquest.”