Kathryn Smith

     
Kathryn Smith
University of Stellenbosch
serialworks@gmail.com
www.serialworks.info


Biography

Kathryn Smith (b. 1975) works at the interface between studio practice, scholarly research, writing and curatorial work, exploring spaces of uncertainty, risk and experimentation, with an abiding interest in forensic aesthetics. Recent exhibitions include the Havana Biennale 2012, and the 2008 Biennale of Sydney (as ‘curatorial comrade’). She co-curated Dada South? at the Iziko National Gallery (2009/2010), and produced One Million and Forty-Four Years (and Sixty Three Days, SMAC 2007), an anthology about contemporary attitudes to the avant-garde. She is senior lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts, Stellenbosch University, and a 2012/2013 Chevening scholar (MSc Forensic Art, University of Dundee, Scotland).

Illustrated Talk

Incident Room: Jacoba ‘Bubbles’ Schroeder 1949 – 2012
Incident Room: Jacoba ‘Bubbles’ Schroeder 1949 – 2012 is a response to one of South Africa’s most infamous unsolved crimes, the murder of the 18-year old Jacoba ‘Bubbles’ Schroeder, whose body was found lying in a lying in partially burned, bushy veld in Birdhaven, Johannesburg on the morning of 17 August 1949. She was last seen in the company of three young men from prominent families but no evidence was found linking them to the murder, and no one was ever brought to trial.

Incident Room is a project of and about forensic looking and the failure of truth, that is, a set of facts do not add up to the truth of a situation. It was first presented as a reading room and active research space at Gallery AOP in Johannesburg and then at Goodman Gallery (Cape Town) in August 2012.
The central component of the project is a series of digitally-printed ‘still life’ constructions that reflect different moments in a process of archival research that has stretched over two decades, including the re-discovery of what remains of the police case file in the National Archives, which has been missing for about 50 years. The print portfolio is a factual-fictional visual construct that also talks about years of travel, and making art from bureaucracy, the primary object of which seems to be the printed document. It was presented in the context of related video works, artist’s books and photographic works. Constructed from actual archival documentation, facsimiles of same, print media, images of objects and actual objects, it offers a way into aspects of truth, facsimile, artifact, evidence, forensic aesthetics and authenticity within the context reprographic media of print, digital print and photography; and also in the context of a criminal ‘cold case’, which places a different set of demands on truth.