Book Review:

Carrol Clarkson

Carrol Clarkson Professor of English, University of the Western Cape; Research Associate, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam.

Keywords: 40 nights / 40 DAYS from the lockdown, Hanien Conradie, John Higgins, postcards, juxtapositions

Abstract

40 nights / 40 DAYS from the lockdown is a series of 40 postcards with small mon-tage texts by John Higgins and watercolour paintings by Hanien Conradie inspired by photographs in old issues of National Geographic magazines.The texts are assemblages of fragments sourced from news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, and from books in Higgins’s own library: an offcut from a conversation between Elizabeth Warren and Dr Anthony Fauci (for example), jostles with a phrase from John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice on a postcard with a painting of a waterfall.