Afterlives of Land Dispossession and Patterns of Climate Change: Intersections in South African Contemporary Art

Abstract

Climate change is a vast global relationship made manifest by experiences of variability in local weather conditions. In the South African context, this reality is inextricably tied to historical land dispossession and politics around land reform. Art offers new conceptual vocabularies for understanding and responding to entanglements between land issues and climate change in the country. This article discusses the works of Ledelle Moe, Simphiwe Ndzube and Dineo Seshee Bopape, three contemporary South African artists who explore land politics either explicitly as material or indirectly through metaphor. Three concepts – entanglement, hyperobjects and fabulation – are speculatively submerged into the land to analyse selected works by the three artists, additionally drawing from qualitative interviews, visual material and online news media. The article situates the artists’ work in the nexus between land politics and climate change, exploring three mediums to offer new metaphors for meaning-making in South Africa’s climate knowledge infrastructure, increasingly critical for understanding and responding to climate change in the country.