Zimbabwean artist Dan Halter's exhibition serves as a reminder that we are still defined by borders drawn on maps, rather than by humanity. With the difference between "us" and "them" in terrible focus, a line from Michael Ondaatje's book The English Patient comes to mind. Katherine Clifton, who lies dying in the Cave of Shadows, writes in her diary: "We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men."This idea is echoed in Zimbabwean artist Dan Halter's exhibition "The Original is Unfaithful to the Translation", on at Whatiftheworld in Cape Town. It's a subtle meditation on his homeland's history, and the way in which maps and borders come to govern people.The show is on two floors. The works downstairs, explains Halter, serve as a "quirky history lesson using seminal documents that defined the historical course of the country known as Zimbabwe". Halter deploys his signature weaving style, which involves shredding documents and images and meticulously weaving them back together.story_article_left1Halter applied this technique to a Jorge Louis Borges short story, titled On Exactitude in Science, which tells the tale of a map scaled 1:1 - it's as large as the territory it describes, and ultimately useless because of its impractical size.The central work on this floor is a sculptural installation (titled The Past is Another Country) that features a designer carpet representing Africa rendered in different patterns of tartan, inscribing the history of European colonisation on the continent. Intricately suspended above the carpet, from three woven baskets painted to look like space re-entry balloons, hangs a little plastic mesh "China bag", which Halter regularly uses as a metaphor for migration.The China bag, ubiquitous in Africa, has become an emblem of the immigrant all over the world. In Germany, it's known as a Turkish suitcase, and in London it's a Bangladeshi bag. In some parts of west Africa it's a Ghana-must-go bag or simply the refugee bag.Upstairs, Halter creates a poetic conversation between the worlds of analogue and digital technology. In Google Compression Object he weaves together a screen-grab of a map that has no information available, instead simply reading: "We are sorry, but we don't have imagery at this zoom level for this region. Try zooming out for a broader look."mini_story_image_hright1Interested in the way that digital technology pixellates reality, Halter pushes this logic to a mammoth extreme in Study With Colour 2. A 2m x 5m version of the same text constructed from paint swatch cards, the work only comes into focus at a distance and is better viewed through the lens of a cellphone.At first glance, the works might appear sparse, but there's a lot happening here. In his previous work Halter has borrowed the image of the Space Invader, the retro video game's fighter spaceship, as a mordant way to represent aliens, or in this case immigrants.This image recurs in Space Invader (Expat 1), in which the pixelated ship is built in three dimensions from China bag mesh.The theme is deepened by a woven piece titled New Identity - an image of a green South African ID book. But it's not until one takes the time to read the woven work, The Map is Not the Territory, that the bite of the exhibition comes sharply into focus.Consisting of a quote from a border jumper at Beitbridge, who tells of the desperation of coming in search of work and money to send home, it goes to the heart of today's turbulent immigrant experience - and hammers home how we are still defined not by our humanity, but by borders drawn on maps.'The Original is Unfaithful to the Translation' is on at Whatiftheworld in Cape Town until May 30 2015...