GOOD HOPE, Carla Liesching

210pp.., b/w & colour illus., paperback, MACK, UK, 2021

ISBN: 9781913620424

In Good Hope, South African-born artist Carla Liesching constructs a fragmented visual and textual assemblage that revolves around the gardens and grounds at the Cape of Good Hope. She brings together cumulative layers of documentary prose, personal essay, found photographic material, apartheid-era trade journals, tourist pamphlets, National Geographic and Life magazines, contemporary newspapers and family albums, to offer an intimate and critical examination of White supremacist settler-colonialism in the present, and a questioning of the ethics and politics involved in the very acts of looking, discovering, collecting, codifying, preserving, naming, knowing, and putting to language.

"A layered and fragmented narrative made up of both photographs and personal prose ... ultimately it is very much about the present, in all its continued brutality and inequity." British Journal of Photography

"[Liesching’s] work examines human relationships to structure, in particular ideological shifts in geographic narratives." Mail & Guardian

Carla Liesching is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking and design. She lives between South Africa and Ithaca, New York, where she works as a visiting critic in Cornell University’s Art Architecture and Planning Department; as a lecturer in the Art, Art History and Architecture Department at Ithaca College; as faculty at the International Center of Photography, and as co-ordinator of the School of Criticism and Theory. She is also a youth educator focused on image-making, visual literacy and self-publishing as vehicles for expression and empowerment.