Don't Look Back

Don't Look Back invites the viewer to enter a salt pan, which is also a portal. Burgerspan is a naturally occurring salt pan in the Darling area of the Western Cape, South Africa, one of several pans which the artists great-grandfather Woolf Beinart would harvest salt from, in the early 1900s. Woolf emigrated from Lithuania to South Africa in the early 20th century, and settled in Malmesbury, in the Western Cape, where he set up the Darling Salt Pans and Produce Company. Memory is impossible to capture, the more we try to find it or search for it, the more elusive it becomes. There is a saying that to see ghosts, you need to look out of the corners of your eyes, not try and look directly. The installation explores attempts to remember, capture or search out our past, our ancestors, and a discovery that it is through the indirect, chance occurrences that we find ways of understanding our past, and therefore our present. The title Don't Look Back refers to the migrant's dilemma, and particularly that of the Jewish diaspora - whether to attempt to preserve the customs and traditions of the old home, or to leave them behind, and start anew, adapting to the new environments they find themselves in. The title also refers to the story of Lot's wife, who in the bible is punished by looking back at Sodom by being turned into a pillar of salt. It raises a question about the very nature of genealogical research; is it wise to try and uncover one's origins? Our identities are formed so much from handed-down truths that to dig deeper can raise difficult dilemmas around identity and choices. It is impossible to be objective. This work is a collaboration with Rebecca Beinart.