A poetics of redemption: Keith Dietrich's reinvention of the colonial archive

• Published in: Critical arts 2015-12, Vol.29 (sup1), p.116-133
• Main Author: van Robbroeck, Lize
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adorno; Aesthetics; Artists; Colonialism; Dietrich; Discourse analysis; mapping; missionary; Redemption
• ISSN: 0256-0046; 1992-6049
• DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2015.1102263

In this article, I question whether it is possible for white artists in a (post-)settler colony such as South Africa, to engage the colonial archive in a redemptive manner. I do so by investigating the visual and discursive strategies employed by Keith Dietrich in three art projects that probe aspects of the colonial encounter in South Africa. I ask, via Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, whether a redemptive aesthetic rereading of archival materials such as that which Dietrich attempts, is a kind of sublimation and, if so, whether it is accompanied by some form of erasure that empties history of its sufferings. In my analysis of Dietrich's work, I conclude that his acknowledgement and aesthetic transfiguration of the wounding discourses that shaped the colonial past, purge them of their claims to truth and offer a form of redemption that promises no absolution, but redeems through the notion of a shared humanity founded on difference, pain and displacement.