Margaret Courtney-Clarke

Dust on the Wind
Francisco Carolinum Linz

Desert, Transformation, and Resistance

The Namibian photographer Margaret Courtney-Clarke (b. Swakopmund, Namibia, 1949; lives and works in Swakopmund) studies the creative practices of indigenous women in southern, western, and northern Africa in their domestic environments. She spotlights the histories of the people living in the Namib and Kalahari deserts and grapples with questions of social justice in our time—extended droughts, climate change, environmental degradation, and the impact of extractive industries in a resource-rich yet arid country. Courtney-Clarke’s ongoing project Caged reflects on the constraints imposed by socioeconomic and political forces by documenting fences, pens, and cages that, in a variety of ways, restrict, protect, and delimit individuals and places in Namibia.

Dust on the Wind surveys Margaret Courtney-Clarke’s oeuvre of the past fourty years. With essays by the curator Virginia MacKenny, the artist Pippa Skotnes, and Alfred Weidinger.