Triumph

Brett Murray, Triumph (film stills), 2015
Dual-channel digital video installation
6 min 48 sec
Editor/camera: Gavin Elder
Sound: Warrick Sony
Production: Monkey Films
Sound studio: Milestone Studios
Edition of 3
Courtesy Goodman Gallery

Leni Riefenstahl’s fascist propaganda film Triumph
of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935) shows
Hitler’s infamous 1934 Nuremberg Rally speech.
This terrifying and compelling oration appears to
be an echo still reverberating through current sites
of conflict in many countries. Religious, territorial,
cultural, ethnic and racial battles across the world
are incited, propagandised and perpetuated by
means of the same powerful myth in which the
protagonists chant, ‘We are the chosen people!’
The mirrored videos of Murray’s work Triumph
are a reminder of what we have come through, but
also serve as a warning of the demagoguery that
South Africans may face in the future (and as an
ironic manifestation of some of what underpins
the current wave of xenophobia sweeping across
the country).

Brett Murray studied fine art at the University of Cape Town.
From 1991 to 1994 he established the sculpture department
at the University of Stellenbosch, where he curated the show
Thirty Sculptors from the Western Cape in 1992. In 1995 he
curated Scurvy, with Kevin Brand, at the Castle of Good Hope,
Cape Town. That year he co-curated Junge Kunst aus Zud Afrika
for the Hänel Gallery, Frankfurt. In 1999, he co-founded—with
artists and cultural practitioners Lisa Brice, Kevin Brand, Bruce
Gordon, Andrew Putter, Sue Williamson, Robert Weinek and Lizza
Littlewort—Public Eye, a section 27 company that manages and
initiates public art projects in Cape Town. Public Eye has initiated
projects on Robben Island, worked with city health officials on
AIDS awareness campaigns and initiated outdoor sculpture
projects including the Spier Sculpture Biennale. Murray curated
Homeport in 2001 in which fifteen artists created site-specific,
text-based works in Cape Town’s waterfront precinct.
Murray was included on the Cuban Biennale of 1994, and
his work has been exhibited at Museum Ludwig, Cologne. He was
included in Springtime in Chile at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Santiago (1995) and was part of the travelling show Liberated
Voices: Contemporary Art From South Africa, which opened at
the Museum for African Art, New York in 1998; Min(d)fields at
the Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel 2004; and The Geopolitics of
Animation at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville in
2007. He won the Cape Town Urban Art Competition in 1998, which
resulted in Africa, a 3.5-metre bronze sculpture for Cape Town’s
city centre. He won, with Stefaans Samcuia, the commission
to produce an 8 x 30-metre wall sculpture for the foyer of the
Cape Town International Convention Centre in 2003. In 2007 he
completed Specimens, a wall sculpture for the University of Cape
Town’s medical school campus. In 2011 he produced Seeds for the
University of the Free State and in 2013 he was commissioned
to produce the 7-metre bronze Citizen for Auto & General Park,
Johannesburg. His solo shows include White Boy Sings the Blues
at the Rembrandt Gallery, Johannesburg (1996); I love Africa at
Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town (2000); Us and Them at the Axis
Gallery, New York (2003); and Sleep Sleep at Goodman Gallery,
Johannesburg (2006). His recent show, Hail to the Thief, was
at Goodman Gallery, Cape Town in 2010 and Goodman Gallery,
Johannesburg in 2012.