Nelson Mandela famously said: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you speak to him in his own language that goes to his heart.”
In a country with 11 official languages and countless other unofficial languages people are often forced to live in a world where they find themselves perpetually lost in translation.
An exhibition at the Standard Bank Art Gallery in Johannesburg,
Photographs in Our Mother Tongue, curated by Same Mdluli, showcases the works of more than two dozen prominent South African photographers from the bank’s corporate collection.
The exhibition asks if an image truly does speak 1,000 words or if the same linguistic barriers that divide so many, exist in an image as well. These questions are by no means simple to answer – the exhibition title perhaps provides a lens through which to address them.