Glenys Johnson: The Ground You Walk On

Serpentine South Gallery 17 Jan — 22 Feb 1987 Free

This exhibition displayed Glenys Johnson’s beautiful and mysterious life-size figures, derived from everyday newspaper images from South Africa.

Johnson examined our often one-dimensional reading of these images, blurring the boundaries between ‘art’ images and the images of the news media.

The individual experience of people in unhappy, sometimes distant, places was presented as elusive, our understanding of it nearer to fantasy than reality. Johnson challenged us to recognise what we do not or cannot know, and questioned our passivity as consumers of reported political events in which we are not directly involved.

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