“The heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.” – Pierre Nora
Ravelle Pillay’s work delves into the heart of history, questioning and reimagining its relationship to memory—both personal and collective. If the heart of history is antithetical to memory, then Pillay offers us its soul, its spirit, but also its perverted psyche. Through her practice, memory refuses to be suppressed.
Pillay’s practice profoundly explores the legacies of colonialism traced through familial encounters with Indian indentured labour and British aristocracy. In her recent exhibition at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, she presents a series of large-scale paintings inspired by oral histories, particularly those recounted by her mother regarding their ancestral home in Durban lost due to apartheid-era dispossession. She embarked on a journey to locate this home, only to find it in ruins, neglected and forgotten. In ‘The Weight of a Nail,’ the foundation and namesake of the exhibition, Pillay employs brooding grey tones to depict the home evoking the ghostly residue of the past and the cyclical nature of trauma inflicted by racist policies.
A critical foundation to her work is the notion that painting can unveil layers of history, influenced by the colonial gaze that defines photographic and material archives from which her paintings largely emanate. This concept underpins her approach, resulting in a painting practice characterized by intentionality, instability, and disquiet. She uses history but only insofar as it is useful, reflecting the wisdom that everything is useful if you know how to use it.
In ‘The firstborn (interloper),‘ depicted in ethereal blues and rich greens punctuated by fragments of fading browns, Pillay captures the essence of the abandoned Britannia Hotel in Durban. Built in the late 1800s as a segregated space and later acquired by an Indian owner, the hotel’s history is fraught with contestation and erasure. The work contemplates a story detailing an ancestor of hers who was disinherited by his British family for marrying outside the racial line. Through this work, Pillay challenges the deliberate racial disinheritance and complex disavowal of the experiences of people of colour (beginning with her own family), offering a poignant reclamation of personhood.
‘I never forgot you’ is a triptych depicting a serene landscape. The work is a portrayal of the blurring between real and constructed memories— reality and fiction, past and present. In an interview following the exhibition opening, she tells me that her goal is not to document history as it happened or to capture places as they once existed. Instead, she sorts through the possibilities to account for experiences attached to reality. ‘Queen and country,’ for instance, features a young Mohandas Gandhi leading an ambulance corps of indentured and recently freed individuals during the Anglo Boer War. It is loosely based on archival photographs, washed in thin layers of oil paint and rendered in yellowing residue, the work confronts the sanitized official records that populate South Africa’s past, highlighting the gaps in how history is read.
Most of the works in ‘The Weight of a Nail’ are in conversation with the natural world—through foliage, forests, trees, streams, and riverbanks. These lush backdrops draw even more attention to the insidiousness of colonialism through the evocation of the sublime, where the sublime (to call on Jean-François Lyotard) ‘becomes the user of nature.’ This employment is an abuse and a violence that is impatient, despairing, and disinterested in attaining the ends of freedom, speaking directly to the methods and effects of colonialism.
Pillay’s interest in the natural world as a witness to violence and oppression is reflected in paintings such as ‘Queen and country,‘ ‘I never forgot you,’ and ‘The gates.’ She articulates a deep commitment to uncovering the mechanics of oppression, aiming to intervene and capture the smallest of details that end up having a ripple effect through time. Her work is not merely a historical inquiry but a personal excavation, one that she is careful to obscure – using opacity both as a form of protection but also a deepened suture that allows for multiplicity through retelling. Her slow approach encourages viewers to dwell in the difficult parts of history. The images are heavy, their mass holding tangible and ephemeral objects of contention.
Notes
- Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520.
- Nielson, Toby. “Science Fiction Cinema in an era of Climatic Change.” University of Glasgow, January 2020.
An article written by Nkgopoleng Moloi
Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail