"What role can an artist play in the preservation of real, living memory?"
Bruce Clarke (b. 1959, London) is a visual artist and photographer of South African descent through his parents, raised with a keen awareness of inequality and of the role art can play in raising public consciousness. He studied Fine Art at the University of Leeds in the 1980s under professors associated with the Art & Language movement, and settled in France in the early 1990s. From this position he has developed a body of work that examines contemporary history, its fractures and transmissions, and the images through which we attempt, sometimes awkwardly, to narrate it: a practice rooted in critical figuration, attentive to traces, silences and stories too often ignored.
Active in the anti-apartheid movement, and after a period of work and research in South Africa, Clarke was drawn in the early 1990s to Rwanda. A few weeks after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi he undertook a photographic project documenting the aftermath, and from that encounter with a devastated country emerged the Garden of Memory (2000-2021), a vast memorial installation near Kigali, conceived with victims' families and realised with the support of civil society organisations, Rwandan institutions and UNESCO: an experience of collaboration with a community seeking to make the invisible visible and to repair what can still be repaired. In 2014, for the twentieth commemoration of the Genocide, he initiated Upright Men: larger-than-life silhouettes, silent appeals to dignity, which have travelled through exhibitions from Geneva to Montreal, Brussels and Ouidah, and are now permanently installed in public spaces in Kigali, Brussels and Bègles. In 2024 the project became Upright Women, renewing the artistic gesture to speak specifically of women during and after the genocide, exhibited in Rwanda and beyond.
Between 2017 and 2020 the travelling exhibition Sea Ghosts (Fantômes de la Mer), addressing trans-Mediterranean migration, was shown in European cities as well as in Dakar and on Gorée Island, Senegal, and in Mauritania. Clarke has worked with the Afrika Cultural Centre in Johannesburg and has led visual arts workshops in South Africa, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Benin, Tanzania, Zambia and France. In 2022 he was invited to exhibit within the European Capitals of Culture programme, at the National Museum of Resistance and Human Rights in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, and at the IX Fort Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania; in 2024 the Camp des Milles Memorial Foundation in Aix-en-Provence devoted a retrospective to his work on Rwanda. Through each work he seeks to make palpable what must persist, memory, resistance, the presence of humanity, even when the world in which we live often denies them. He lives and works in France.