“Awe, Masekinders!”: Kullid Identities from Eden Park, Johannesburg in the Work of Bougaard

Abstract

ABSTRACT Bougaard, an emerging South African creative practitioner, examines games from her “Coloured” childhood community in Eden Park, Johannesburg, and how these games may offer a window into a reframed Kullid identity. She considers the rhymes used in these games and the role of language—specifically Afrikaaps—in identity formation, and explores through papermaking and art installations the social contexts and meanings embedded in these games. In this article, the authors analyse Bougaard’s use of sculpture, papermaking and printmaking techniques both to mediate and to subvert conventionalised tropes and stereotypes of “Coloured” communities as well as to empower a sense of her familial and community-based identity through an emergent Kullidness. The authors focus on selected paper works and on three mixed media installations (2021–2022). The authors complicate any reading of these works as uncritically affirmative of a declamatory and essentialist identity position by proposing Bougaard’s visual strategies as premised upon mediation, ambivalence, indexicality, and refuting iconicity. The authors identify Bougaard as deploying elements of strategic essentialism in her desire for community visibility and visual sovereignty, and the authors therefore critique the benefits and the limitations of this approach, concluding that Bougaard’s choice of mediating strategies avoids a simplistic narrative of community life.