South African Artist Research Articles

Addressing a Difficult History: Representations of Sarah Baartman by Three South African Artists

ABSTRACT Penny Siopis’ Exhibit: Ex Africa (1990), Willie Bester's Sarah Baartman (2000) and Senzeni Marasela's Theodora, Senzeni and Sarah (2010) were each made 10 years apart from one another. In exploring representations of Baartman amongst artists working, respectively, in 1990, 2000 and 2010, the author reveals that each work in some sense responds to discourses about Baartman and ideas about representation current at the time it was made. It is suggested that each maker grappled critically with the profound challenge of visualising a historical figure whose own voice is muted in the archive and is instead known through cartoons, sensationalist newspaper reports and various other accounts often informed by prejudicial attitudes. However, the author argues, the three artists have done so in different ways from each other and in the light of shifting attitudes towards Baartman, varied understandings of the aspects of her narrative that may be deemed important, and changing ideas about the ways most appropriate for registering horror at her treatment.

South African Nuclear Necropolitics in Helmut Starcke’s Study for “Vaalputs Madonna”

Art provides a meaningful instrument with which to understand, reflect, and communicate history, humanity, scientific progress, and societal threats. Nuclear art is a particular and critical art form that deals with the duality of the nuclear chain reaction which is either used for peaceful purposes such as nuclear medicine and food irradiation, or for weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear bombs. Despite South Africa’s long nuclear history and unprecedented voluntary nuclear weapons disarmament, nuclear art as a visual practice is underdeveloped in the country. This article considers German-born South African artist Helmut Starcke’s Study for “Vaalputs Madonna” (2007) as a visual expression of South African nuclear art, and the nuclear necropolitics related to the Vaalputs National Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility in South Africa’s Northern Cape province. Starcke’s use of Marian iconography and his juxtaposition of European and African art symbolises the violence of nuclear colonialism, while he also confirms the realities of the nuclear necropolitics of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.

South Africa at the Tate: Searching for a National School and a National Identity

On 20 September 1948 the Exhibition of Contemporary South African Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture opened at the Tate Gallery in London. It was organised by the newly formed national arts body, the South African Association of Arts, generously sponsored by the newly elected apartheid government, and hailed to be the first representative exhibition of South African art ever to be held abroad. Beyond its size and position at the Tate, it might, in retrospect, easily be relegated to the status of just a provincial collection of mildly avant-garde work reflecting the European influence and tutelage that most of the artists received. However, a considered study will show that it was a watershed moment for the politics of national art and representation, and for getting South African artists onto an international stage. By considering its local context, the selection process and the local and international responses to this exhibition, this article will provide an assessment of the concerted efforts made by an underdeveloped, colonial art world to promote and export a ‘national’ South African school abroad. It will highlight the exhibition’s critical position in the early development of a local South African art world in four aspects: first, the Tate exhibition evidenced the South African art world’s debut on the international art stage; second, it signified a local shift from privileging European art to preferring South African art; third, it hinted at the advancement in the South African art world toward modernism from academic art; and fourth, but not least, it raised issues of a national art to a national consciousness. Ultimately, the exhibition engendered a prominent public discourse about national art, national identity and representativeness that reached a general audience beyond the art world.

“The Dam Wall Broke”: A Constructivist Grounded Theory Method Analysis of Writing on the First Decade of Democracy in the South African Art World

ABSTRACT The end of each decade of democracy has seen periods of reflection in the South African visual art world through numerous initiatives, especially exhibitions and book publications. In 2024, after 30 years of democracy, the field is poised for another such moment of introspection. This article considers the first decade of democracy from the perspective of writing in the art world. Through a Constructivist Grounded Theory Method extant text analysis, a reading is conducted across various prominent South African art publications reflecting on the first decade, and these texts are coded to discern the major categories, or themes, that emerge through them, thereby distilling the period’s main features and concerns for influential writers and thinkers in the field at the time as themes. These include, (1) emerging onto the international art scene after the boycott, (2) navigating international demands and local challenges, (3) government failures, (4) presuming equality under democracy and globalism, (5) race and the persistence of white dominance, (6) challenging Western- and Eurocentricism, (7) questioning visual arts education, (8) lacking engagement with art, (9) questions around moving on from resistance art, (10) negotiating and representing identity, and (11) the rise and critique of the gallery system. Not only are the major concerns and their textures succinctly revealed through the rigorous Grounded Theory Method coding process, but their crystallisation also deepens our understanding of how the art world has interacted with the periods of democracy, and which particular sets of preoccupations have informed its discourses.

Below the Surface: Swimming Pools as Sites of Memory in Post-Apartheid South African Art

The private swimming pool is an iconic part of the South African suburban landscape, sustained by dark legacies of migrant and domestic labour and ecologically unsustainable practices as much as by climate and lifestyle. It is also a powerful signifier of the shifting neuroses of its privileged, predominantly white, middle-class resident bathers. This article argues that, in representing the private swimming pool, contemporary South African artists interrogate issues “below the surface” of unresolved historical trauma and create a space for often reparative memory work. Works by Kirsten Beets, Lungiswa Gqunta, and Berni Searle are examined in painting, video, and installation; works examined have all been produced against the backdrop of Cape Town’s severe drought of 2015– 2018. Avoiding a habitualised instrumentalisation of water, the article thinks with water firstly as memory and secondly as a container for a traumatised South African consciousness, grappling critically with issues of acculturated whiteness and notions of privilege, leisure, and recreation in the time of climate crisis. This is done by interpreting works by the selected artists, bringing into focus how water itself, while “captured” in the swimming pool, is nonetheless acting through the works and this article to shape an imaginary of watery spaces alongside and through the sociopolitical. Watery spaces are also argued as existing even in the absence of water.

To Be Free! The Art of Gavin Jantjes

This article contemplates the life and work of the Oxford-based South African artist and activist Gavin Jantjes, born in 1948 when apartheid officially became the law of the land in South Africa with the National Party’s election to power. Because Jantjes’s understanding of his role as an artist took shape in Cape Town in the 1960s, when every aspect of his life was dominated by the racism of the apartheid state, he has questioned both the incongruities of his life and what his role as an artist has meant, establishing himself as an outspoken and imaginative critic of institutionalized racism and other forms of discrimination. Facing the dual obstacles of race and poverty, as well as the pejorative assumption of the Western European modernist canon that Africans lacked the ability to produce meaningful contemporary visual art, Jantjes engaged head on as an artist and activist with tensions between Western modernism and classical African art and the trope of “primitivism” in Eurocentric art historical discourses. This article foregrounds Jantjes’s multiple roles, both in and outside of the studio and gallery spaces, by examining his paintings, prints, and drawings, as well as material related to his curatorial interventions, writings, and formidable publishing efforts, to reveal pivotal moments in his personal and artistic journeys across five distinct yet overlapping phases of his artistic movement from 1970 to 2023.

A Risk Prediction Model to Identify People Living with HIV Who are High-risk for Disengagement from Care after HIV Diagnosis in South Africa.

The provision of ART in South Africa has transformed the HIV epidemic, resulting in an increase in life expectancy by over 10 years. Despite this, nearly 2million people living with HIV are not on treatment. The objective of this study was to develop and externally validate a practical risk assessment tool to identify people with HIV (PWH) at highest risk for attrition from care after testing. A machine learning model incorporating clinical and psychosocial factors was developed in a primary cohort of 498 PWH. LASSO regression analysis was used to optimize variable selection. Multivariable logistic regression analysis was applied to build a model using 80% of the primary cohort as a training dataset and validated using the remaining 20% of the primary cohort and data from an independent cohort of 96 participants. The risk score was developed using the Sullivan and D'Agostino point based method. Of 498 participants with mean age 35.7 years, 192 (38%) did not initiate ART after diagnosis. Controlling for site, factors associated with non-engagement in care included being < 35 years, feeling abandoned by God, maladaptive coping strategies using alcohol or other drugs, no difficulty concentrating, and having high levels of confidence in one's ability to handle personal challenges. An effective risk score can enable clinicians and implementers to focus on tailoring care for those most in need of ongoing support. Further research should focus on potential strategies to enhance the generalizability and evaluate the implementation of the proposed risk prediction model in HIV treatment programs.

A Hack Into Nature: An Interview With James Webb

The interview focuses on South African artist James Webb’s ongoing series There’s No Place Called Home. In this intervention, Webb conceals an audio speaker in a local tree while broadcasting the calls of foreign birds into the public sphere. The artist has made this intervention in more than fifty locations worldwide, every time using a unique birdcall. The interview discusses different aspects of the series, such as site politics, power, listening, and human relations.

The Mundane and The Magical: An Interview with Usha Seejarim

The Mundane and the Magical, a sculpture by contemporary South African artist Usha Seejarim, was installed outside the Radisson Red Hotel in Rosebank, Johannesburg, in 2021. Five meters in height, the sculpture consists of two giant red wings constituted from the soleplates of domestic irons. In an interview on May 7, 2024, at her studio, Seejarim discussed the work’s development as well as the choice and treatment of its subject matter with Public Art Dialogue coeditor Brenda Schmahmann. Focusing on the domestic realm, a topic that had been the artist’s central focus since her exhibition Venus at Home (2012), The Mundane and the Magical was also particularly apt in the context of COVID-19, when the oppressiveness of home was often experienced with increased intensity.

Imagining black feminist geographies of Johannesburg through Senzeni Marasela’s creative (un/re)mapping of Johannesburg’s mine slopes

ABSTRACT Part of the project of philosophy is to problematise how the world is known, including destabilising geography as one of the dominant imperialist discourses. In the Afropolis, legacies of colonialism and Apartheid still work to uphold spatial inequality within urban spaces in ways that are both racialised and gendered. Black feminist scholar, Katherine McKittrick, provides a fruitful theoretical foundation to consider postcolonial cities from a renewed epistemological perspective. In the 2006 book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, McKittrick works alongside and across traditional geographies through critical black geographies that centre a black feminist sense of place. In considering ‘a black sense of place’, McKittrick demonstrates how transatlantic slavery enforced and naturalised the connection between blackness and placelessness. She writes to document black women geographies and provides a narrative that locates and draws on black histories and black subjects to ‘make visible social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographic’. This paper places McKittrick in conversation with the work of South African artist Senzeni Marasela through their selected literary and artistic works to explore alternative feminist geographies of Johannesburg’s decommissioned mine slopes/dumps, and to emphasise the liberatory potential of a black feminist point of departure in relation to the mining–industrial complex. The argument is not merely that Johannesburg needs to become more inclusive to black feminist understandings of place, but rather that the centring of black feminist geographical knowledges has the subversive ability to reshape how the city is known in the first place. In doing so, this paper hopes to ‘raise questions about the ground beneath our feet, and how we are all implicated in the production of space’.

How to see the South African black people in Santu Mofokeng’s image-text archive?

South African artist Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 (1997) displays black people’s photographic portraits and text through a slide projection. For this archive project, he collected, restored, and re-contextualized the old portraits and added text. The presented figures depict the black South Africans who lived at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them are well-dressed and take a pose in a European studio. Different from the well-prepared photographic representation, pieces of text include a disorder of alphabets, varied size of letters, inconsistent ground color, and misprinting effect. In a sense, the ambivalent mode of images and text seems to appeal the black people’s inner conflicts between being modernized versus colonized. In fact, Mofokeng once said that such a middle-class of black people did not exist in his education. Thus, this research analyzes the ways in which intertextuality of images and text in The Black Photo Album fills with the incomplete part of South African history. Reconsidering the functional limits of the TRC(Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1995) in South Africa, this research argues that Mofokeng’s archive project delivers emotions of memories of the black people, which were not registered in the nation’s history.

‘We Will Teach Them How to Use This Building’: Acts of Accountability from South African Artists

On 3 March 2021, almost a full year after South Africa's theatres were closed due to Covid-19 restrictions, renowned opera soprano Sibongile Mngoma walked into the Johannesburg offices of the South African National Arts Council (NAC) to meet with senior department officials. She was there to demand accountability over their non-payment of promised Covid-19 artist relief funds to the tune of R300 million (roughly USD 16.6 million). When it became apparent that no official would honour the meeting, Mngoma announced her intention to wait. She did not leave the building for another sixty days.

Couples motivational interviewing with mobile breathalysers to reduce alcohol use in South Africa: a pilot randomised controlled trial of Masibambisane

IntroductionHeavy alcohol use among people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa can hinder the success of HIV treatment programmes, impacting progress towards United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS goals. Primary partners...

Speaking Back to the Landscape Canon: Cultural Translation in Phumulani Ntuli’s Cloud Migration and the Liewe Land! Exhibition

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that contemporary artists in post-and decolonial contexts are adopting deliberate approaches to respond to and revise canonical art, in what I interpret as acts of cultural translation. Seeing representational practices through this linguistic lens, with concomitant grammars and vocabularies, sheds light on how established conventions may now be challenged through translation—filtering and transforming them. I am particularly interested in the historical South African landscape canon and in how Phumulani Ntuli and several other artists employ different strategies to contest and reimagine the erasures and biases enacted in the canon in their work for the exhibition Liewe Land!. The exhibition was held at the Voortrekker Monument in 2021, and included various artists who all responded to printed reproductions of landscape paintings by historical South African artists. The strategies used by artists that I investigate here include: the reinscribing of people into portrayals of empty colonial landscape scenes, the subversion of pictorial unity and the naturalistic style solidified in the canon through western conventions, and lastly, the use of pre-colonial iconography, grammar, vocabulary and registers of representation that evoke historical relationships between land and people.

The work of art, beside and beyond rights

ABSTRACT How does the work of art mediate the recognitions we give one another in a rights-based order when that order cannot guarantee the rights it promises? What does an account of the open-ended, norm-mediating, performative and socio-aesthetic complexity of the work of art offer this ‘After Rights?’ inquiry? In addressing these questions, I draw on the insights of Jacques Ranciere, Fiona Jenkins, Jean Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, and Sylviya Lechner and Mervyn Frost to argue that the work of art, as a creative and interpretive aesthetic locus, ethically constitutes its practitioners (artists and audiences) as participants in an open-ended norm-mediating risk relation. The argument is that the work of art is an encounter-event practice for performing our commonality beyond power, violence, hierarchy, reason, and rights – even as that work also lends itself, as a beside-rights practice, to the mediation of hidden and discriminatory rights-abusing practices and norms. I do so via a consideration of the work of South African artists which mediate and contest misogynistic, heteronormative and racist discriminations beside and beyond the rights guarantees of the 1996 South African Constitution.

Physical Pain as a Source of Spiritual and Artistic Inspiration in Jackson Hlungwani’s Work

Jackson Hlungwani is a locally recognised South African artist and he is internationally acclaimed with a considerable amount of literature written about his life and work, highlighting his uniqueness distinct rural style (Leibhammer &amp; Nel, 2022) and commercialised value (Lauwrens, 2007: 121-124). He was born around 1923 (according to his grandmother, it was during the time of the Kaiser’s war) (Burnett, 1989: 4). Having acknowledged his contribution to the arts, this paper analyses the man and his work from a different viewpoint, focusing on three aspects of his life namely the human, spiritual and artistic. However, these three aspects should not be considered three independently functioning sides of this man’s existence but three tightly interwoven elements. The research investigates how Hlungwani’s physical pain was embodied in his religious activities and wooden creations and how his suffering, caused by a chronic condition of damaged body tissue, was faced, accepted and assimilated to become a source of spiritual strength supporting his religious ideology and artistic inspiration guiding his remarkable creativity. This study highlights how this South African-born artist dealt with his chronic, somatic condition and turned it from a supernatural condemnation into a source of spiritual strength and creative inspiration. Therefore, through a comparative approach, the study uses relevant published and unpublished biographic material, justified critics and preserved manuscripts in libraries, the media, art museums and exhibitions to unpack the theme of physical pain as a source of spiritual and artistic inspiration in Jackson Hlungwani’s work.

On Migration, Exile, and Cosmopolitanism: A Brief Survey of South African Art Song

One of the genres that comprise the different musics of South Africa is that of the art song. Imported through its European heritage, the art song has found a place in the portfolios of South African composers throughout the twentieth century. However, against the backdrop of its complicated history, South Africa’s art songs often seem to reflect themes of exile, inner struggle and nostalgia. This article contemplates how these themes resonate through South Africa’s complex history, and how they have subsequently been reflected in the genre of art song, with specific reference to songs by composers S. le Roux Marais, Hubert du Plessis, Arnold van Wyk, Peter Klatzow, Hendrik Hofmeyr, and Bongani Ndodana-Breen.

What blind people can teach sighted viewers about art

ABSTRACT While sight and hearing have been privileged in the philosophical formulation of aesthetics, the significance of touch to the experience of art has not enjoyed much attention at all. In order to displace sight and reinstate touch as a viable mode of engagement for the interpretation of visual art, this article reports on a study in which blind individuals and sighted people who were blindfolded were interviewed about their experiences of artworks. The participants were invited to touch selected sculptures in South African artist, Willem Boshoff’s Blind Alphabet (1990 – ongoing) installation. The main aim of the study was to investigate the nature of the tactile aesthetic experience elicited by these sculptures when they are handled and not seen. Secondly, the study aimed to reach a deeper understanding of how tactile engagement with art enriches the experience, meaning and power of the work for both those who can and cannot see. Through the investigation it was revealed that visual art can forge a bridge between individuals with and without blindness.

An Intersectional Reading of Senzeni Marasela’s Work: Making Visible the Marginalised Lived Experiences of Black South African Women in States of Perpetual Waiting

This is a study of the way Senzeni Marasela, a South African artist, uses dress to subvert the invisibility of Black South African women, who have previously been marginalised and restricted to the context of the home and domestic work. This article studies several works across Marasela’s career, with a focus on the immersive performance titled Waiting (October 2013 to October 2019) and Theodorah Comes to Johannesburg (2005). The works are read in terms of their presentation on social media and in their art context. In particular, social media posts made during the six-year performance period of Waiting are studied to ascertain how the act of posting content online is used to further make visible Black South African women living through the effects of apartheid. The purpose of this study is to explore how Marasela narrates a lived experience of Black womanhood in ways that are distinctly layered and intersectional in their adoption of discourse and complex in their presentation to the audience.

Mzansi Magic

Mzansi Magic