Solo Exhibition
11 December - 25 January 2025

Exhibition Opening: Wednesday 11 December 2024
Exhibition Closure: Saturday 25 January 2025 Share Facebook Twitter

WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Dust in the Balance, a solo exhibition by Dan Halter.

Dan Halter’s exhibition The Dust in the Balance is an exploration of entropy, displacement and the colonial and post-colonial systems of expropriation and violence. But these themes can only be understood in this current body of work when one considers Halter’s understanding of place.

Throughout Halter’s work there is a distinct sense of belonging to something that, for want of a better term, might simply be called ‘home’. Home, for Halter, is a location of mixed memory and materiality. It exists in a plural, liminal, space between Zimbabwe, Switzerland and South Africa. His work is a construction of place, interrogating post-colonial life, as much as it is a site of painful memories and nostalgia.

The Swiss roots of his parents have often been the invisible hand on the tiller of his art practice, but these roots have an arresting significance. Although nostalgia, derives from the Greek words ‘nostos’ (home) and ‘algos’ (pain), it is a notion closely associated with the Swiss. The disease of Nostalgia was first observed and identified in 1688 by the Swiss doctor, Johannes Hoffer, amongst Swiss soldiers who had left their Alpine homeland. Hoffer diagnosed the disease as an affliction of the imagination. According to Hoffer it created ‘an uncommon and ever-present idea of the recalled native land in the mind.’

As the theorist Svetlana Boym related, Hoffer noticed that amongst its Swiss sufferers it created an ‘amazing capacity for remembering sensations, tastes, sounds, smells, the minutiae and trivia of the lost paradise that those who remained home never noticed’.

Halter, with his almost obsessive interest in materiality and cultural expression — both African and Swiss — fills his work with these material minutiae. Certain iconic images, the China bags of displaced migrants, texts relating to place, the African art of weaving, ID documents, money and the German ‘blaudruck’ material, all surface and resurface in his work.

Halter’s artistic practice in many senses is an investigation of the effects of displacement. Nostalgia was, as Hoffer realized, brought on by displacement. Its cure, he discovered, was the act of returning home. What distinguishes Halter from the Swiss soldiers of the 17^th century, who could make the journey home, is not only his critical engagement but the plurality of home for the colonial subject. Home is not simply a place of wonder and a source of recovery. In fact, the ‘home’ of the nostos is no longer a place, it is a fabrication of confused pluralities. And as Halter acknowledges, as Joseph Conrad did, that whatever and wherever this nostos is, it ‘was one of the dark places of the earth.’

Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, has made regular entries into Halter’s work, as it does in the Feather of Maat. Like Conrad, Halter regularly refers to the unsettling darkness of the colonial world and its attendant European metropole (a place Conrad referred to as ‘the door of darkness’).

But it is the repercussions of the colonial period that have affected him personally. A recurrent theme in Halter’s work is one of the darkest moments of his life, the attack on his parents in their home in Harare in 2005. The plans and images of the house, designed and built by his grandfather in Harare, occur in the work The past is never dead. It’s not even past. (Blaudruck) 2022.

The work is a cornucopia of dark references and meanings. The embroidered hand-made blaudruck fabric, with its industrial Germanic origins, contains within it the notion of a ‘blueprint’. The blueprints of the house appear in the pattern. But this is not simply a reflection on home, the ‘druck’ also contains a notion of violence, of push or ‘hold down’. And the force in the printing process of the fabric become manifested in the work. Violence or ‘druck’ is seemingly revealed in the pattern in what looks like the round bruising of skin.

But this is not the only reference to that deeply personal moment. Zino irema rinosekerera warisingadeagain references the attack. The Zim dollars from the attack torn into the forms of broken teeth is an allusion to the trauma of that day. ‘They smile but they don’t mean it’ is literally what the expression states in Shona. It is the insincere smile of 400 years of colonial contact, a smile that is pregnant with violence.

But this specific crime, that so shaped Halter’s thinking and emotions, is in many senses weighed up in the exhibition against all the other colonial crimes that have haunted southern Africa. In many of the works, the colonialism and its aftermath are quite literally placed in the balance. In one such work, On Trial for My Country, the Zimbabwean novelist and historian Stanlake Samkange’s seminal novel of the same name is reproduced over the Zimbabwean flag, its cut ribbons lie in the balance of justice. Samkange’s novel places both Cecil John Rhodes and the Ndebele King, Lobengula, on trial and controversially allowed the reader to assess who was the criminal, who the victim. In Halter’s work we quite often get the sense that victimhood is both complicated and confusing, although the crimes might be clear. In his, When the missionaries came … the pronouncement is clearer but the conceit of weighing the crime is continued.

The exhibition begs the question, who or what is behind these crimes? References to the ‘DNA’ in several of the works, suggests that there is a structure to the colonial and post-colonial state of affairs. Halter’s reference to government as having the ‘Monopoly on Violence’ seems to confirm the almost Orwellian nature of the colonial and post-colonial crimes. They are the crimes of a system, of the system of colonialism and its attendant capitalism.

These crimes are structural, perpetuated by systems and their masters. The victims are the individuals, caught up in the woven mesh of the prevailing political and social order. Halter, evokes and fabricates this sense of a painful systemic, (one might say ‘nostalgic’) landscape with his interweaving of materials, expressions, texts and signifiers which all relate to place and culture. This minutiae of references are woven together to create a journey of nostalgia without redress. As Boym argues, ‘modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values.’

Inherent within Halter’s work is a world without clear values and borders, his feeling towards fabrication and construction arrive from the trauma and violence of the colonial and post-colonial contact. But there is another aspect to Halter’s work that elicits a story of creative collaboration. From the Blaudruck (and its similar African wax print process), in Stanlake Samkange’s work, and Halter’s engagement with weavers and wire artists there is a collaborative and generative practice. It is a practice that in some senses is the counter balance (or maybe the eponymous ‘dust in the balance’) to the dark and entropic forces that have surrounded much of the past 400 years of southern African history.

Text by Matthew Blackman