Nina Romm
Lives in Johannesburg, South Africa
Training:
1972: BA(FA), University of Cape Town
1975: MA(FA), University of Cape Town
1978: De Vrije Academie, Den Haag, The Netherlands
1984: sabbatical research in USA on the role of creativity
in individual and social change
Works:
`The Post-Colonial Verdict of Mz A Ninny Mouse: CLOSURE - OVERDRAWN ACCOUNTS'
(1994) mixed media
`Study for Erratic Theatre 1: Sandwich the Dream between
Conspiracies of History - DON'T PLAY WITH THE LION'S BALLS'
(1994/1995) mixed media
Both works are from the Europe/ Africa Conflagratio series
1991 - 1995
Of these works Romm writes:
The Europe/ Africa Series was started in 1991.
The series 'plots' a personal/ metaphoric record of
struggle, engagement, survival on this dark continent. The
works explore routes, roots, routines; the juxtaposition of
origins and destination; of the banal and the symbolic;
historical fact and visionary future. They inscribe and
'mark out' the "no man's land" of a fictive or potential
political tomorrow - to be generated through a
transformation of past beliefs and paradigms.
The territory is simultaneously personal and public; real
and transmogrified; apocalyptic and vernacular; tragic and
celebratory; cerebral and viciously visceral.
The works, through a stylistic mode of collage, overlay and
convergence (a mind-scape format linked to the pictorial
procedures of, for example, Robert Rauscheberg - in
contradistinction to the traditional mimetic realist
landscape), thus challenge traditional polarized and linear
organization of thought and narrative. The overlay and
juxtaposition mode adopted alludes to the interspersal of
immediate 'reality' with dream, history and our image of
the future, arguing that 'reality' itself is tautly honed,
and constantly inflected by complex variables.
Very specifically, the works explore the relationship
between personal biography, fictive biography and socially
determined biography - examining, perhaps, the 'cartography
of the psyche' as it is constructed through external
geography - both physical and political.
In essence, then, the works are about transformation:
(i) of personal identity - through time, and social
context; (ii) of society - through evolutionary and
revolutionary change.
The works demarcate symbols and icons of 2 orders - an old
order and an envisioned (newly enversioned) order:
reminding/ prompting/ coercing the viewer to explore and
confront the 2-track structure of the contents of
contemporary consciousness.
Inherent in this invocation is a challenge to the viewer:
to participate, through contemplation and re-cognition - in
the CLOSURE of a reductive authoritarian historical order,
driven by the dictates of power and subjugation - to create
and embrace a new and more generous modality.
The invocation carries political, psychological and polemic dimensions.
(from text supplied by Nina Romm, September, 1995)