A safe house is artist and curator Brent Meistre’s first full length film. Known for his analogue photographic and stop-animation works, here Meistre re-envisions objects, excerpts of film, sound and music as means of retelling and sense-making about intimacies within collective memories of 1980s South Africa.
Witnessing complicates this partial retelling about a time when Meistre, as a child, was often taught to block his ears, close his eyes, or not to tell. Working through this fog of embargo on the senses, Meistre narrates silenced and redacted memories of being within a family closely intertwined with the local apartheid security police in Grahamstown (now Makhanda).
A safe house explores the ways in which the artist-child-witness might remember and re-imagine fragments of what has been erased or destroyed. Autobiographical and embodied practices, using film as a communal tool, conjure traces of the past, navigate shame and perform memory.
About the Artists
Brent Meistre is a Makhanda born artist, photographer, educator and researcher. He is also the founder and curator of Analogue Eye: Video Art Africa, a mobile drive-in & pop-up cinema which has showcased the works of over fifty African artists in South Africa, Germany, Austria and Ireland.
His various photographic, stop-animation and video artworks are included in private and public collections including the Eye Film Museum, Netherlands, The Eskenazi Museum, U.S.A, The South African National Gallery, The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, The Oliewenhuis and The Nirox Foundation.
He has partaken in a number of international artists residencies including OMNE Lab in Italy, the traveling Sound Development City across Spain and Morocco, Cultureland in Amsterdam and at Interface, Connemara, Ireland.
He has worked with researchers, NGO’s and collectives such as the London-based Decolonial Dialogues, and most recently in India for a collaborative project between Queens University, Belfast and Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
He is currently completing his PhD exploring trauma and erasure in the archive.
- Programme type: Curated Programme
- Genre: Visual Art
- Duration: 100 minutes
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Ages:
16+
- Adult Themes
