They Came From The Water While The World Watched
Giya Makondo-Wills
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.
Giya Makondo-Wills is a British-South African documentary photographer. Makondo-Wills is concerned with identity, race, colonisation, the western gaze and systems of power. Her practice continues to develop and pushes to engage and collaborate with marginalised communities. She holds a BA (hons) and a MA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales (formerly Newport). In 2021 she began teaching on the BA Photography at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). She lives and works between the U.K and The Netherlands. She also works with other educational institutions as a visiting lecturer. She has exhibited her work internationally, some highlights include; Lagos, Johannesburg, Dusseldorf, Milan and Paris as well as widely within the UK. Featured in several ‘graduate of the year’ profiles, she has won an IFOR documentary photography award and been shortlisted for other prizes.She was nominated for the 2019 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass and in 2018 selected as one of the '31 women to watch out for' by the British Journal of Photography. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Photography, Royal Photographic Society journal, It’sNiceThat, Unseen Magazine and Source Photographic Review, amongst others. Her first photobook was released in 2020 They Came From The Water While The World Watched is available via the Lost Light Recordings. In 2022-2023, Makondo-Wills is commissioned by FOTODOK to produce the body of work about Utrecht communities, with which she will partake in a group exhibition opening FOTODOK at the new location of De Machinerie.
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’.