Law and the Land - Private Show

A photographic exploration of justice, place, ancestors and spirit in  Namibia

Luke Kaplan's powerful exhibition explores the spiritual, cultural, and legal relationships between a San community in Namibia and the land in which they live. The photographic work emerged through a collaborative research project with the Ju/’hoan people of N//homa village, which sought new ways of representing the law: not merely as a codified set of texts, but by portraying the land claims of this community, and others like it, in a manner which does justice to an embodied and spiritual sense of living law. The San of Southern Africa (sometimes called Bushmen) are a widely dispersed and diverse group of people, who despite language and geographical differences share deep cultural commonalities and historical experiences: they were hunter-gatherers with a particular relationship with the land in which they lived, and were the first inhabitants of most of the region. They also…