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Pieter Hugo
Opening: 25-10-2014 from 17:00 - 19:00
Rotterdam, both rooms

Cokkie Snoei is pleased to announce Kin, a new exhibition of photographs by Pieter Hugo. The exhibition runs from Sunday, October 12, until Saturday, November 15. However the opening reception in the presence of the artist will be on Saturday, October 25 from 17:00 to 19:00 pm.

This is Pieter Hugo's fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Kin is a bittersweet perspective on Hugo's homeland of South Africa. It is a meditation on the ideals of home, both familial and humanistic. It explores the tenuous ties that both bind us to and repel us from others.

Kin is the artist's personal exploration of South Africa through landscapes, portraits and still life photography. Hugo depicts locations and subjects of personal significance, such as cramped townships, contested farmlands, abandoned mining areas and sites of political influence, as well as psychologically charged still lives in people's homes and portraits of drifters and the homeless.

Hugo also presents intimate portraits of his pregnant wife, his daughter moments after her birth and the domestic servant who worked for three generations of Hugo's family. Alternating between private and public spaces, with a particular emphasis on the growing disparity between rich and poor, Kin is the artist's effort to locate himself and his young family in a country with a fraught history and an uncertain future.

Hugo describes the Kin project as "an engagement with the failure of the South African colonial experiment and my sense of being 'colonial driftwood' ... South Africa is such a fractured, schizophrenic, wounded and problematic place. It is a very violent society and the scars of colonialism and Apartheid run deep. Issues of race and cultural custodianship permeate every aspect of society here and the legacy of Apartheid casts a long shadow ... How does one live in this society? How does one take responsibility for history, and to what extent does one have to? How do you raise a family in such a conflicted society? Before getting married and having children, these questions did not trouble me; now, they are more confusing. This work attempts to address these questions and to reflect on the nature of conflicting personal and collective narratives. I have deeply mixed feelings about being here. I am interested in the places where these narratives collide. Kin is an attempt at evaluating the gap between society's ideals and its realities."

The exhibition coincides with the launch of Pieter's latest publication, 'Kin'. He will be signing copies at the opening.

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