The Earth Underneath a Pulverised Horse I and II

Thato Toeba is an artist and lawyer who uses collage to reflect on troubled and chaotic histories, with a particular focus on the legacies of colonisation in Southern Africa. Autograph and the V&A Parasol Foundation Women in Photography curatorial project co-commissioned Toeba to create two new artworks responding to the archive of British war photographer Horace Nicholls (1886–1941), held in the Royal Photographic Society collection at the V&A.

Nicholls worked as a British photographer during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), a brutal conflict in Southern Africa between the British Empire and the Afrikaner (Boer) republics established by Dutch settlers, fuelled in part by the struggle to control Johannesburg’s lucrative gold mines. In these sculptural works, Toeba imagines a ‘white wedding’ ceremony, reflecting on colonial institutions that sought to render Africa unavoidably ‘European’. The artist was struck by the near-total absence of black Africans in this archive and the rarity of images showing the brutality of war, finding instead mostly scenes of everyday life among British settlers in Johannesburg: from official ceremonies in the town square to parades marking events in the English social calendar.

By creating two distinct cut-out shapes depicting the negative space beneath a horse, Toeba layers Nicholls’ photographs with imagery from key moments in Southern African history. In doing so, the artist juxtaposes the contradictions of ‘truth’ in the photographic archive. The title, The Earth Underneath a Pulverised Horse, asks us to remember those placed at the peripheries of history – hidden from sight to sustain the illusion of colonial grandeur.