The Love Letter Exhibition - commemorating 10 years of Movie Snaps

As South Africa marks 31 years of democracy, the Love Letter exhibition at the UCT Michaelis Galleries speaks in the language of absence and memory, with some of its standout pieces including an over two-metre large apartheid eviction letter and 80kg of keys once kept by families forcibly removed from their homes.

Running until May 16, it appears alongside the evocative Movie Snaps photographic exhibition.

The Love Letter commemorates the 10-year anniversary of Movie Snaps, the exhibition and documentary film on street photography and forced removals in Cape Town by University of Pretoria Professor Siona O’Connell in 2015. 

Once a beloved pastime, having your black-and-white portrait taken by Movie Snaps photographers captured everyday elegance on Cape Town’s streets from the 1940s to the ’70s.

The Love Letter invites visitors to revisit those memories through images, installations, and the stories behind them.

The project is produced collaboratively by O’Connell and Michaelis Galleries, UCT, curator Jade Nair, with the support of the University of Pretoria, District Six Museum and the Centre for Curating the Archive.

Along with the two-metre display, the exhibition features a further selection of eviction letters in display provided by the District Six Museum and the Commission on Restitution Land Rights, as well as period-accurate recreations of outfits worn by people in the Movie Snaps photographs sourced from vintage stores, alongside movie snaps photographs. 

“When I joined this project as a project manager ten years ago I’d never heard of Movie Snaps, I didn’t know what a Movie Snaps was. Until I saw a few and realised that the photos of my maternal family I had grown up looking at were Movie Snaps. So deeply ingrained are Movie Snaps in family archives across Cape Town that for many, the only photographic record of our forebearers are Movie Snaps. They are glamorous objects - beautiful black and white photographs of stylish people. But they belie a collective trauma, the displacement of forced removals,” said Nair. 

The exhibition was launched on Freedom Day with guests young and old from across Cape Town in attendance, including Commissioner for Restitution Dr Wayne Alexander and UWC vice chancellor Professor Robert Balfour.

Speaking at the opening, UCT, Emerita Professor Linda Ronnie added that South Africa was by no means unique in its history of dispossession, “this is the story of every person whose land was and is being forcibly taken from them”. 

“One of the most brilliant pieces of writing to capture this notion of historical dispossession is from Lebogang Seale and he writes: ‘[my home] is only a distant nostalgia now, for the land is no longer ours. Today it belongs to the descendants of colonial settlers; strangers who came from far-off places, and claimed it as their own. As in other parts of the country, the claiming of this land was an arbitrary and capricious land grab with no regard for owner’s rights and sovereignty. The occupation altered our lives on a scale that is unimaginable.’ Like Lebogang Seale and others, Siona O’ Connell looks at ‘the long reaches of the past’. She reminds us that everyday life continued then and still continues now and that we owe it to ourselves to acknowledge, remember, and talk about those moments (for ourselves and for future generations), even though they hold the potential to conjure up what Dikgang Moseneke, former Deputy Chief Justice, describes as ‘feelings of fresh dispossession’ – a haunting, melancholic yet necessary reflection. What can we learn from these past/present experiences? To continue the conversations and to raise issues wherever and in whichever way we can,” said Ronnie. 

The Love Letter is open to the public, free of charge until May 16 at Upper Gallery, Michaelis Galleries, UCT Hiddingh Campus, 31 Orange Street Gardens, Cape Town. The gallery is open weekdays from 10am to 3pm. 

Cape Times