Boarderliners

Giya Makondo-Wills is a British-South African documentary photographer based in Utrecht whose work explores race, colonialism and systems of power. In one of her recent projects Boarderliners (2020), commissioned by the Royal Literary Fund, the artist looks at what it means to be mixed race in the U.K. today. Intimate portraits are accompanied by the stories of people she photographs. One of the character shares: “My mother was Irish and my father was from Barbados, I was an illegitimate child and as much as she would have liked to have kept me she couldn’t. I was adopted by a white family, an Iris mother and an English father. In the adoption correspondence letters it is mentioned the difficulty placing me due to my ‘colonial blood’.

In They Came From The Water While The World Watched (2016-2019), Giya Makondo-Wills depicts indigenous South African Ancestral belief and Christianity in relation to missionary activity and the colonisation of the country, addressing the long-term repercussions of the 19th century European colonial agenda. She discusses the attempted dismantling of Ancestral religion and its replacement with Christianity whilst considering documentary photography and the Western gaze, and exploring the sanctity of keeping traditional beliefs alive and the adaptation to the world we know today. The complex interplay between Christianity and Ancestral religion manifests within the artist’s own family, where it is common practice to call on God and The Gods. Being both British and South African, Giya Makondo-Wills addresses the clash of beliefs from the point of view of the coloniser and the colonised. Embodying a dual perspective and with an exploratory approach, she highlights the symbiotic relationship between cultural elements and the resilience of pre-colonial customs in as they adopt a modern guise. The title They Came From The Water While The World Watched is a reference to the initial European migration and colonisation of South Africa and the Western world's indifference to the perpetration of this act.