Did you feel that you had somewhat exiled yourself by leaving Paris for Johannesburg?

In terms of making art, Johannesberg did seem a backwater. When I came back to it after this gap of doing other things I was doing it in the context of this small South African art world. Because of the cultural boycott there was no real expectation of it being part of the conversation of art making anywhere else, so by the early 1990s, when the cultural boycott ended, apartheid ended, and curators came to South Africa to look at what was happening there, I’d had several years of working quietly, developing these films, working alone. I was kind of astonished when curators and gallerists were interested because it looked so completely different from what I had seen in the art magazines when I had traveled around Europe.

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