Beyond the Barricades, Reimagined

Apartheid, or the systematic oppression of Black South Africans during the 20th century, racialized nearly every aspect of life and led to civil war in the 1980s between resistance groups and the state. In this resistance, Afrapix was born, a collective of photographers who labored to document the growing unrest against the white minority through many means, including public photographic exhibitions. Some exhibitions ultimately became publications, including Beyond the Barricades: Popular Resistance in South Africa in the 1980s (Hill & Harris, 1989). This project, named Beyond the Barricades, Reimagined, is a digital remixing of the anti-apartheid photography found in the original version of the Beyond the Barricades exhibition and publication. This project asks visitors to immerse themselves in the descriptions and images of the South Africa of the 1980s, to explore the curiosities of the large-format projection medium and to reckon with the atrocities of the apartheid state. Beyond the Barricades, Reimagined invites users to see and experience the memory of apartheid through stories of South Africa’s racial past.