In the mid 1970s, Yunus Essop, father of the young photographer twins Hasan and Husain Essop, was forced to leave District Six, a racially mixed suburb of Cape Town located on the lower slopes of Table Mountain overlooking the harbor. In 1966 the State had proclaimed District Six an area for White use only. Demolitions began in 1970, and the population of 60,000 people were moved out, street by street.
Thus Yunus Essop’s twins, Hasan and Husain, who were born in 1985, grew up in Rylands Estate, a dusty working-class area on the Cape Flats, where drug use and gang wars are endemic and shootouts were not uncommon. When the twins grew up and went to art school Rylands, with its tensions and its busy street life, became the subject of an extended photographic project.
Rather than take photographs of various places and people characteristic of Rylands, though, Hasan and Husain photographed each other for their individual series, playing all the parts in tableaux staged at the mosque, the bathhouse, the fabric shop, and the video store. Their fresh-faced energy and the clean, saturated color of the images lend a sheen of good humor to the staged scenes.
After the twins graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2006, they began to work even more closely together, producing collaborative images in which both played roles. At the same time their work began to question more deeply their role as young Muslim men, not only against a background of their hometown of Cape Town, but also in a contemporary world where religion has become increasingly polarized.
Today it seems that the Eastern philosophy of Islam has become associated with militancy in the minds of many around the world, and this stereotype is one confronted by the twins in their images. In these new works Hasan and Husain address the complex roles they must play in society by dressing in religious robes ready for Islamic prayers, and also in the camouflage gear and sharp clothes of youth culture.
They also continue to address local history. Thornton Road in Athlone on the Cape Flats is the site of a notorious incident of police entrapment, known as the Trojan Horse incident, in which innocent bystanders were shot by the police. The Essops point out that far from a memorial to this unhappy event, today a huge Coca-Cola sign dominates Thornton Road. Sardonically toasting this international symbol of consumerism, the Essops play out the roles of contemporary youth having fun.
When deconstructed, the scenes the Essops choose to enact can be read as a catalogue of the challenges they face as young men not only in their own suburb of Rylands but in the larger world.
“Sujuud, Closest to God” 2007
LightJet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
Image size: 84 x 118 cm
Image courtesy of the artists and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Hasan and Husain Essop
“Thornton Road” 2008
LightJet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
70 x 123 cm
Image courtesy of the artists and and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Hasan and Husain Essop
“Five Pillars” 2008
LightJet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
70 x 123 cm
Image courtesy of the artists and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Hasan and Husain Essop
“Weight Pulling” 2008
LightJet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
70 x 123 cm
Image courtesy of the artists and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Hasan and Husain Essop
“Fast Food” 2008
LightJet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
70 x 123 cm
Image courtesy of the artists and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Hasan and Husain Essop
“Pit Bull Fight, Athlone” 2007
84 x 118 cm
LightJet C-print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
Image courtesy of the artists and the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
© Hasan and Husain Essop