These days Matthew Krouse can usually be found in the bookshop he runs upstairs in the David Baillie Gallery at Victoria Yards in Lorentzville, Johannesburg. With his usual, self-deprecating and dry sense of humour, Krouse seems a little bemused at the fuss being made about things he did in his 20s. Back then, he was living the life of a gay drama student newly arrived in Johannesburg from the East Rand town of Germiston, where he was born to a Jewish mother and an Afrikaans father in 1961.
A recent excavation of several of the anti-authoritarian, avant-garde films he made – along with a selection of writings, illustrations and images produced during a flurry of anti-apartheid, pro-LGBTQIA+ and activist-centred artmaking in the 1980s and 1990s – has been curated and exhibited under the guidance of South Africa-born artist Adam Broomberg at Kunsthallo Gallery in London, England. The physical space has migrated online owing to the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Matthew Krouse’s ‘mid-career retrospective of a no career’
1 May 2021
Matthew Krouse on the set of The Soldier, a film about militarism and male rape. (Courtesy of Matthew Krouse)
Earlier this year, Adam Broomberg, a Johannesburg-born artist living in Berlin, phoned Matthew Krouse, a former actor turned writer and editor, with a request. It didn’t involve Yiddish translation work.
“People seem to think I am Isaac Bashevis Singer, which I’m not,” says Krouse, who was born into a Jewish family from Germiston in 1961. He grew up speaking Yiddish with his mother and has previously helped Broomberg with translations. “I won’t ever win a Nobel prize for writing in Yiddish,” he insists in reference to the Polish-American writer’s 1978 accolade.