Also known as Cullinan I, the Star of Africa is a 530-carat white diamond cut from the Cullinan diamond, a 3,100-carat stone that was mined near Pretoria. A smaller, sister stone was also cut from the massive Cullinan diamond and is set in the Imperial State Crown. Both the scepter and the crown are traditionally used by British monarchs during ceremonial occasions.

A Change.org petition calling for the stone to be returned to South Africa has already garnered over 8,200 signatures by Friday afternoon.

“The diamond needs to come to South Africa. It needs to be a sign of our pride, our heritage, and our culture,” Mothusi Kamanga, a lawyer and activist in Johannesburg, told Reuters. “I think generally the African people are starting to realize that to decolonize is not just to let people have certain freedoms, but it’s also to take back what has been expropriated from us.”

Not everyone agrees, however, that the stone should be returned.

“I don’t think it matters anymore. Things have changed, we’re evolving,” Johannesburg resident Dieketseng Nzhadzhaba told Reuters. “What mattered for them in the olden days about being superior… it doesn’t matter to us anymore.”

The scepter is one of more than 100 objects collectively known as “The Crown Jewels,” which date back to the 17th century, and, per a Town and Country report, “are traditionally a major part of the coronation ceremony when a new monarch officially takes the throne, because each has a special meaning connected to the monarch’s reign.”

The Sovereign’s Scepter with Cross, in which the Star of Africa is set, is “meant to represent the crown’s power and governance” and has been an integral part of coronations since it was created in 1661 for King Charles II’s coronation. It has been used in every coronation ceremony since and was last publicly seen last September when it was placed on the Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin during her state funeral.

The discourse around once great colonial powers repatriating works that they were given—or took with force—has been become increasingly heated. These calls for repatriation, however, have typically focused on artifacts like the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes.

The incident has loomed large for South African multi-disciplinary artist Gabrielle Goliath, who last year debuted Chorus, a two-channel video and sound installation that acts as an elegy to Mrwetyana. The moving 23-minute installation depicts the University of Cape Town choir sounding a lament for their late friend and colleague in one monitor, while the other remains empty, signifying the victims of gender-based violence in South Africa.

Goliath’s work resides in numerous collections, including London’s Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Zürich, the South African National Gallery, and others. Goliath has also won numerous awards, including Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale in 2017 and the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2019.

Later this month, Chorus will be shown at Dallas Contemporary in what will be Goliath’s first institutional show in the United States. Goliath told ARTnews in a recent interview that, despite Chorus’s South African context, she expects American audiences will “find local and personal resonances” in the work.

“It really is a work that has the capacity to move one deeply,” she said. “You enter an experience like Chorus and the work enters you sonically. It inhabits you as much as you inhabit it.” 

The project is far from Goliath’s first to engage with victims of gender-based violence or to create opportunities for reflection and dialogue. In 2015, Goliath began the long-term performance project, Elegy, which similarly responds to the endemic crisis of femicide in South Africa. For the project, performances were held in South Africa, Brazil, Europe, and the United States, where seven female opera singers sounded a lament over the course of an hour – collectively sustaining a single note, passing it to one another as they individually mounted an illuminated dais. Each performance commemorated a specific woman or LGBTQIA+ individual subjected to fatal acts of gender or sexual violence. Accompanying each performance was a eulogistic text, scripted by a friend or family member of the subject.

Chorus, which Goliath considers “a culmination of sorts” of the work in Elegy, similarly makes an effort to engage those closest to the victim.

After Mrwetyana’s death, a spate of organizations and individuals in South Africa used her name without permission to solicit donations for their causes and projects. It was so pervasive that the family had to threaten legal action to stop the practice. The issue informed Goliath’s approach to Chorus.

“It was thus doubly important for me to approach them very openly and to seek out their blessing without which the work would have been profoundly compromised,” Goliath said.

When Goliath conceptualized Chorus, she made sure to talk to Mrwetyana’s family first. She began by presenting the concept to Mrwetyana’s mother in “great detail.” After Mrwetyana’s mother took time to process the work, she and the Uyinene Mrwetyana Foundation collectively consented to have Goliath create the work.

Goliath’s memorializing practice comes from a deeply personal place. On Christmas Eve in 1991, Goliath’s childhood friend was shot at her home in Kimberley, Northern Cape, in what is spoken of as a “domestic incident.” The experience was traumatic, and profoundly influenced her practice. In 2010 Goliath produced a photographic series of 19 brown women as “surrogate presences” for her friend Berenice; one for each year since her death. She revisited the work this year with a new series of portraits for the intervening years.

The common thread through Goliath’s work, from Berenice 10-28, 2010 to Chorus, is a call for participants to engage in the long and transformative work of mourning and a collective refusal of “the negation of these lives” as faceless victims, in Goliath’s words. 

Chorus, for example, includes a commemorative roll in the exhibition space of women, children, and LGBTQIA people who have suffered gender-based violence in South Africa since Mrwetyana’s death. It is a living document reflecting the ongoing nature of the crisis — last year’s staging of Chorus contained over 460 names, while the Dallas Contemporary edition will have an updated list of more than 670.

“Chorus is about community, about gathering-to,” Goliath said. “It is not a work of exceptionalism but one that recognises that to undo the crisis-norm of sexualized, racialized, patriarchal violence, and to realize the world differently requires that each and every one of us recognise our implication within a world of others, and the bearing that implies – across difference, across borders, across our capacity to ‘relate’ – indeed, across all that may otherwise separate (and ‘exonerate’) us.”

The video performance in Chorus was filmed days before the first lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in late March 2020. The timing, according to Goliath, meant that she completed the work in Johannesburg, where she is based, under “strange and isolated conditions.” 

The pandemic affected Chorus in other ways. The work was originally meant to debut at Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India’s largest art exhibition, in December 2020, but the show was postponed due to the pandemic. Instead, the work debuted in Cape Town, which given Mrwetyana’s status as a UCT student and the role of the university choir in the piece, was “very meaningful,” according to Goliath. The piece will appear at the long-delayed biennale in Kochi this December.

The decision to present Chorus at Dallas Contemporary is the result of “many conversations” with Emily Edwards, the museum’s assistant curator, according to Goliath. Edwards reached out after hearing about Elegy; the pandemic interrupted initial plans for an exhibit but it also “allowed for a deeper, longer conversation,” Goliath said.

Chorus will be on view at Dallas Contemporary from September 25 to March 19, 2023.

These hulking armored personnel carriers were one of the most visible incarnations of South Africa’s repressive apartheid government (1948–94). The Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs) embodied state-sponsored violence; police and military forces used them to target African township dwellers and attack “terrorists” (aka anticolonial liberation fighters) during the 1966–88 cross-border war in South West Africa (now Namibia) and Angola. Casspirs were locally produced. Due to international sanctions, South Africa had to engineer much of its own military hardware, and the vehicle’s name combines the acronyms CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) and SAP (South African Police).

The name is key to one of William Kentridge’s most disquieting works, Casspirs Full of Love (1989/2000), a hallucinatory drypoint etching that depicts seven human heads crammed onto shelves. The image’s enigmatic title comes from a radio broadcast in which an anxious mother once sent this bizarre greeting to her soldier son. In the 1980s, Casspirs were routinely foregrounded on posters designed for the End Conscription Campaign, part of the national anti-apartheid struggle. One noteworthy example, featuring a spot-on rendering in the style of Roy Lichtenstein, shows a bewildered soldier standing over a body, while his thought bubble reads, “He doesn’t look like a terrorist . . .”

Ziman’s venture—encompassing design, fabrication, and display—is known as the “Casspir Project.” A small rectangle just below the beaded vehicle’s radiator reads “Spoek 1.” Ziman explains that an Afrikaner wandered into the workspace one day and reported that he had driven a Casspir while on active duty. The man claimed that soldiers dubbed these personnel carriers spoeks, which means “ghosts” in Afrikaans, as a riff on Casper the Friendly Ghost. Ziman believes, however, that the choice was clearly meant to increase the MRAPs’ intimidating effect, since the shades of ancestors—sometimes benevolent and sometimes malicious—constitute an important element in the cosmology of many black South Africans.¹

The looming four-wheel-drive Casspirs weigh approximately eleven tons, stretch over twenty-two feet long, and stand more than nine feet high. Ziman’s vehicle is emblazoned with swatches of color extending from the cab roof down to the tires, spanning the shooting ports to the axles, and enveloping the steel outer body as well as portions of the interior troop compartment. His goal was to generate a Pan-African style, thereby indigenizing a reviled symbol of tyranny. Some of the beaded panels echo traditional Zulu, Ndebele, and even East African Maasai patterns and hues; other sections display three-dimensional motifs in a more contemporary palette. Imagine a mash-up of American artist Odili Donald Odita’s bright geometric murals and M.C. Escher’s perceptual experiments. For a militaristic parallel, one might think of Venezuela-born artist Carlos Cruz-Diez’s contribution to the 2014 Liverpool Biennial—a pilot cutter repainted in the “dazzle ship” mode of glaring camouflage first developed during World War I.

Ziman’s crew of female South African beaders and male Zimbabwean wire fabricators worked six days per week for about six months. Ziman created the original design using a 3D computer model whose schema remained posted on a wall at the production site. But the team continually reworked the plan as both practical and artistic challenges arose. The project consumed over 1,300 pounds of small-gauge imported glass beads. It thus recalls, in some ways, the artistic efforts of American artist Liza Lou, who moved to Durban, South Africa, in 2005 and now works with a group of approximately fifty local women beaders (see A.i.A., “Backstory,” January 2017). Particularly germane is Lou’s huge sculpture of chain-link fencing covered with silver beads, Maximum Security Fence (2007–08). The sparkly beauty of the piece partially distracts viewers from the terror of enclosure and the bodily danger posed by the barbed wire that tops the work.

In attention to detail and sheer density of decoration, Ziman’s Casspir is like a magnified version of an object-encrusted memory jug, a Western folk art form of African origin. The entire fabrication process has been recorded by cinematographer Nic Hofmeyr, who previously filmed Miners Shot Down (2014, directed by Rehad Desai), a powerful documentary about the Marikana Massacre, in which South African police opened fire on striking platinum miners in 2012, killing thirty-four. Hofmeyr now intends to travel to each site where the work is exhibited in order to capture reactions from three audience segments: soldiers who previously commanded or rode in Casspirs, Africans who once confronted the vehicles, and those who are too young to have ever encountered these fortresses on wheels.

Ziman is South African by birth but left the country in 1981 after being called to report for military service, which was mandatory for all white men. A pacifist, he refused to support the racist state. Although he eventually made a new home in the United States, he has not acquired American citizenship and adamantly resists being labeled a “former” South African, asserting emphatically: “I’m always an African no matter where I am.”

Ziman’s creative trajectory has been unconventional. An award-winning director of music videos for major pop stars, he gradually became a writer/director of feature films. His best-known movie, Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema (2008), is a harrowing story, based on actual circumstances, that highlights the hijacking of residential buildings in the center of Johannesburg by heavily armed gangs that force tenants to pay rent directly to them, rather than to the legal owners.

More recently, Ziman has found himself attracted by the individual autonomy of art-making. The thread that connects his work in all fields is the examination of violence. His idea to bead a Casspir evolved directly from an earlier collaborative project, “Ghosts” (2013). Profoundly disturbed by the global arms trade that nurtures conflicts throughout Africa, Ziman hired half a dozen Zimbabwean economic migrants to fashion life-size replicas of AK-47s.

These individuals, drawn from a population of two to three million displaced Zimbabweans now in South Africa, ordinarily sell touristy sculptures of animals, fashioning wire armatures on which they then thread strings of beads. Craftsmen such as these are a common sight at certain Johannesburg intersections. Before Ziman recruited them, they were selling their wares directly across the street from one of the most prestigious art galleries in the city.

“Ghosts” addressed the AK-47 as an object fetishized throughout Africa, an enduring symbol of anticolonial liberation struggles. In fact, the weapon appears on the flag of neighboring Mozambique, as well as on the coat of arms of Zimbabwe. In proxy conflicts during the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China furnished AK-47s to rebel movements in both these African countries. Ziman’s vibrantly colored facsimiles, mocking left-over “warrior” fantasies, glammed up these weapons to subvert their aura of power and menace. The artist made photos of men posing with the guns in various locales, put up street murals (some portraying the rifles as made of paper money), and eventually presented the sculptures and photographs in a gallery exhibition in Los Angeles. He apportioned the profits to Human Rights Watch, other NGOs, and his team of salaried craftsmen.

When Ziman located the rusted-out 1980 Casspir, it required a complete reconditioning, inside and out. Representatives from the South African Defence Department soon turned up to inspect the vehicle and the warehouse. Was Ziman purchasing the MRAP for ISIS? Was it roadworthy? Ziman was quickly cleared of any association with insurgents, and two of the artisans undertook intensive training that certified them to repair and drive the Casspir. In the end, the officials endorsed his project; the vehicle has been formally reclassified as a sculpture.

Casspirs were mothballed in South Africa after the first free elections in 1994, but they gained popularity elsewhere. US military forces adopted their own versions of the vehicle in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more recently giant SWAT personnel carriers have entered the arsenal of local American police forces. They now form part of the debate over the militarization of domestic law enforcement. Ferguson, Missouri, is one of the places where MRAPs have been deployed.²

On the day I got my first view of the production of the “Casspir Project,” Ziman and I later set off to eat lunch in the central business district. Even though four people were riding in the car, we were ambushed by a gang that demanded our cell phones and cash. Once we were able to move on—minus some valuables but with no injuries—we mused that perhaps the safest way to navigate downtown Johannesburg these days would be, ironically, in a gigantic military relic.

The first public showing of the “Casspir Project” was on the plaza outside the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. The work appeared from December 15, 2016, to March 31, 2017, in conjunction with the exhibition “Women’s Work: Crafting Stories, Subverting Narratives,” which included twenty-three individual male and female artists and five women’s cooperatives.

The “Casspir Project” debuted at a time when accusations of cultural appropriation—coming from a younger generation of black artists, critics, academics, and museum personnel—are plentiful in South Africa. Heated debates have erupted in the museum world, for example, over the suitability of white curators presenting and interpreting traditional African artifacts. The aestheticization of violence is an additional hot-button issue. Yet these topics remained in abeyance last winter, as the Casspir—with its joyful color scheme, imposing presence, and clear antiauthoritarian message—became a crowd-pleaser.

Casspirs in their heyday evoked anger, dread, and seething resentment. These behemoths remain formidable, although memory of them is negligible among the post-1994 “born free” generation. But Ziman’s elaborate embellishment destabilizes the brute force that this war machine once projected. Working the frontier between allure and peril, his “Casspir Project” is tantamount to forcing a bully to don a frilly frock.   

Endnotes

1. All statements attributed to Ziman are from conversations and email exchanges with the author, December 2016–February 2017.

2. See, for example, Alex Johnson, “Obama: U.S. Cracking Down on ‘Militarization’ of Local Police,” May 18, 2015, nbcnews.com. Local and state police departments across the country have received surplus military equipment via the 1033 Excess Property Program of the Department of Defense.

Eighty colossal Kentridge figures are imprinted on 1,804 feet of waterfront in the very heart of Rome. By a process called “reverse graffiti,” some of the embankment’s accumulated grime was covered with plastic stencils while the complete wall was power washed. The resulting lineup of 30-foot Romans trudge and sway along the river with the authority of movement that is one of the artist’s trademarks: horsemen, charioteers, generals, popes, martyrs, refugees. Kentridge compares it to “Trajan’s Column unrolled.”

Around 3,000 people showed up for the launch celebration, Rome’s official 2,769th birthday. Standing on the embankment, leaning from the bridges, the crowd was mesmerized by the spectacle staged by Kentridge, who is a director of opera and theater among many other things. The event was performed by one hundred volunteers and professionals, and had been announced everywhere simply as a party “on the riverbank at nightfall.” Lights along the water’s edge illuminated a procession of two groups of marching bands, singers, dancers, and standard-bearers, throwing their gyrating shadows up against the monumental figures of the frieze. The performers approached from opposite ends of the embankment, merged in a rousing crescendo of music and movement, and passed one another on their way into history.

Some in the audience puzzled over which group represented “Triumphs” and which “Laments,” as described in the handouts, but it hardly mattered, such was the magic at work. Even Rome’s weather gods were on the side of Kentridge that night, delaying the rainstorm predicted to spoil the party.

The triumph of “Triumphs” is an instance of the right artist in the right place at the right time. Roman friends confided that they had never before been so depressed about their city, currently without a mayor, and believed it needed some spectacular art to lift the public spirits. With Kentridge’s unimpeachable standing, artistically and politically, he was seen as the man to deliver, and he did. April 17 through 24 was designated “Kentridge Week” with the artist seeming to be speaking and appearing everywhere at once, and an exhibition of the Tiber drawings on view at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma  through October 2. Fueling the celebratory fever was the enthusiasm of the project’s huge number of volunteers, plus the fact that the project cost the public nothing. Italian press cited an €800,000 budget from foundation and corporate financing, as well as a deftly publicized Kickstarter campaign.

Billed as the artist’s largest endeavor to date, the piece’s charm is that it has pomp without bombast. Unlike Christo’s public-art works, a comparison on every tongue, Triumphs and Laments does not impose an individual artist’s personal vision on a historic setting, but enters seamlessly into it.

Fourteen years ago, a New York artist on a Fulbright in Rome, Kristin Jones, had a revelation: the section of the Tiber between the bridges the Ponte Sisto and Ponte Mazzini, the only perfectly straight stretch of the river, had the same dimensions as the Circus Maximus, and was destined likewise to be a place of public entertainment. Jones’s measurements have been questioned by many of the architecture pedants who inhabit Rome, but nobody, now, disputes that hers was a corking idea. Jones waged a mainly one-woman campaign to make the river a performance venue until 2005, when supporters joined her to form Tevereterno. The arts non-profit now holds a 19-year lease on what they have renamed Piazza Tevere. There have been temporary projects on the spot by Jones herself and such artists as Kiki Smith and Jenny Holzer. But it took William Kentridge, with the support complex he had at his command, to bring the concept to fruition in a grand Roman manner.

Kentridge is a showman with an unfailing grasp of scale. He knew how to take literally Jones’s concept of the Tiber as a natural theater. The west, Trastevere, bank was his stage, and the opposite bank the audience. His shadow play worked against the backdrop of colossal figures from Roman history. The embankment acoustics amplified Philip Miller and co-composer Thuthuka Sibisi’s original score, which combines African chants, Italian Renaissance madrigals on themes from Exodus, and quotations from Rilke.

But whose history is being told here? The literal “triumph” of antiquity was a military hero’s procession, embellished, in Caesar’s famous case, with a phalanx of elephants holding torches in their trunks. Kentridge preempts narrow interpretation of his title, saying, “Every triumph and glory is someone else’s lament and shamefulness.” History and movement are the staples of Kentridge’s work, and several of its underlying metaphors—the march of time, the march of history, military marches, the march of displaced peoples—are embodied in the Rome frieze. The parallels with the terrors of our time, in particular the sufferings of refugees and religious conflict, are self-evident and moving.

Kentridge selected the eighty real-life characters in the frieze from a database of five hundred images assembled by historian Lila Yawn. Some critics complain they are hard to identify. Recognizable from their garb are soldiers, popes, kings, and philosophers, and refugees clutching menorahs and sewing machines. The film stars Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni (“Triumphs”) and the murdered Pasolini and Aldo Moro (“Laments,” surely), based on iconic news photos, speak to a present-day audience. But who are we to impose our own knowledge base on 2,769 years of history? One benefit of the frieze may be to send viewers running to their history books, i.e., their smartphones (I admit to blanking out over Arnold of Brescia and, more shamefully, the death of Remus) or the glossary app being prepared by Tevereterno. Thankfully, the riverbank itself is free of signage.

While the art press was hailing Kentridge as today’s Michelangelo, others see his project as a sorely needed catalyst for finally cleaning up Rome’s riverfront. Walking in Rome, it is indeed baffling to encounter the Tiber, a sinister canyon of debris in the midst of chic neighborhoods. At a Kentridge Week gathering at the Cascianelli bookshop off Piazza Navona, architect and historian Tom Rankin, a twenty-year resident of Rome and a director of Tevereterno, explained that its flooding had been a fact of life since ancient times, but became an embarrassment to the newly unified Italy of the mid-nineteenth century. “They put up these forty-foot walls, said Rankin, “but with poor planning, sealing off the river.” The present ghost river is an insult to historical truth. Along with its fountains and aqueducts, the Tiber should be a prominent physical symbol of the water whose remarkable natural abundance made the glory of Rome possible. In this city without skyscrapers or freeway interchanges, the curving roadway formed by the Tiber is its largest infrastructure landmark.

Will the Kentridge murals, which will degrade into nothingness after six years, change the fate of the riverfront? International urbanists see a model for success in New York’s High Line. “It is simply efficient,” said Rankin, “to restore a piece of infrastructure that already exists and can easily take pedestrians and cyclists to key points in the city.” World-weary Romans point to conservative tastes and civic apathy. They give the example of an official who was ready to block the Kentridge frieze because it is contemporary art.

Walking back toward the Pantheon after the opening concert, arts television producer Paolo Giaccio, a Rome native, observed he had seen every type of person in the audience on the riverbank. “We are Romans, so we are cynical,” he said. “But if we saw this project anywhere else in the world we would agree it was fantastic.”

South Africa legalized same-sex marriage with the passage of the Civil Union Act in 2006, and it was the first country to abolish discrimination based on sexual orientation in its constitution. That is small comfort to the South African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people who continue to be victims of harassment and violence there. 

Zanele Muholi began her ongoing “Faces and Phases” series, which forms the centerpiece of this show, titled “Isibonelo/Evidence,” the same year the bill was passed, collaborating with her sitters in acts of self-identification and defiance. In the grid of 60 black-and-white portraits that took over two walls of the show’s first gallery, the subjects gaze straight out at the photographer (and the viewer), claiming membership in a group that is gloriously varied. Muholi calls herself a “visual activist,” but her portraits in this body of work, uniform in size and composition, also demonstrate an engagement with photo history, evoking projects like August Sander’s series “People of the 20th Century” and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies of water towers and industrial architecture. 

In the early 2000s, Muholi studied at the Market Photo Workshop in South Africa, founded by the South African photographer David Goldblatt, and her work has appeared in a number of gallery exhibitions, biennials and festivals. This show is her first solo presentation at a major museum, and it gives a sense of the variety of approaches she takes to her work. At the entrance to the exhibition is a large color photograph of two hands holding the open passport of a woman named Disebo “Gift” Makau. The passport is stamped “Deceased,” and the wall text informs us that Makau, a lesbian, was raped and murdered, her body found with a pipe shoved down her throat. A freestanding wall across the room is covered with comments and remembrances that Muholi recorded in her own handwriting on a large chalkboard, describing harassment and incidents of so-called corrective rape. 

The mood and palette brighten considerably in the next section of the show, which contains color photographs of same-sex weddings of Muholi’s friends. These pictures of gender-fluid wedding parties and dressed-up celebrants are jubilant, and have the intimacy of snapshots. It’s interesting that while many of the subjects in “Faces and Phases” could be described as androgynous, the couple featured in a number of these small photographs and in a video in the next room embrace conventional dress codes for brides and grooms: one of the women wears a frilly dress, makeup and jewelry; the other dons a suit, a tie and a crisp white shirt. The video shows them and their guests singing and dancing under the bright South African sun, but lest we feel too cheered, this gallery also contains a clear glass coffin decorated with flowers. Inside the coffin is a black-and-white portrait of Muholi herself, in the same style as the “Faces and Phases” portraits that open the show, a piercing reminder of the violent fate of many in her community.

Photo from Breaking Waves, 2015.

COURTESY THE DRAWING CENTER

Though it may appear archetypically modern—with unambiguous Duchamp references, no less—Robin Rhode’s public art, as depicted in photographic stop-action series, is a far more primordial thing, closely aligned with cave paintings and the outsider surrealism of early memories. Incorporating design elements based on geometric fractals found in traditional West African symbolism, the works in the South African-born, Berlin-based artist’s show “Drawing Waves,” on view at the Drawing Center in New York, acknowledge this fact more directly than his previous, realistically drawn works in charcoal and chalk. In the stop-motion photo series Breaking Waves, blue semicircles, alternating direction, are painted on an unidentified, crumbling city wall, suggesting a longitudinal pattern of ocean waves across which a surfer balances a silver surfboard from an impossible angle. Imagination—is there any other freedom so satisfying?

And yet, Rhode’s escapist interventions inevitably trace an uneasy reality. Accompanying the photo series, the artist recruits a group of children, ages 8 to 10, and films their contributions to a nautical-themed mural on a wall at the Drawing Center in a project titled Paries Pictus-Draw The Waves. Using enormous specially made oil crayons, the children improvise the rendering of the ocean surrounding pre-drawn shapes of 17th-century mercantile ships, a reference to the East India Trading Company, which first settled in South Africa. Juxtaposing unspoiled creativity with a difficult history of colonialism, personal retrospection with participatory components, “Drawing Waves” presents an ephemeral illustration of the state of mind in post-apartheid South Africa.

Rhode and I took to email to discuss his latest show, his life, and his practice. The interview has been lightly edited.

ARTnews: What is it about waves that inspired you to create these works? I read that the nautical motif symbolizes South Africa’s history of colonization, and how it affected your childhood, but could you elaborate on this connection?
 

Rhode: I was inspired by the Khoi San cave painting myth of South Africa, which has a similar narrative to that of Aboriginal Australians. We’ve discovered cave paintings depicting the rudimentary shapes of ships, which would have been their first foreign visual encounter. This idea plays itself out in the Drawing Center exhibition where a group of children were asked to draw their impression of waves around colonial ships that have been painted directly onto the wall surface of the exhibition space. My motive is to create a relational narrative that allows societies to share or connect with certain ideas regarding colonialism or social experiences without being overly pedantic. Rather, I hope my artwork embraces aspects of the drawing experience by creating a visual narrative space in which a youth demographic is able to engage and play.

How often do you work within a political context?
 


I constantly work within a political context, but without becoming overly conscious of it. I prefer to allow forms and lines to govern my political thinking—context is like the wind in the sails of a ship.

What, or who, are your artistic influences?
 


I have many varying influences. I think my biggest influences are artists. I have taken a liking to John Baldessari recently. Mostly because he makes art seem so effortless, while injecting levels of humor as well. I am not so much into the notion of labor, or labor-intensive production. I prefer fleeting moments that are more about the poetic realm. Dreams and idealism are my forte—I only need chalk and charcoal as my tools of expression. This means I’m quite easy; easiness, too, is a gift and a curse.

Photo from Breaking Waves, 2015.

COURTESY THE DRAWING CENTER

You have talked about how the tension in your work between frozen moments and action is connected to how your movement was sometimes restricted during the end days of apartheid, when, for instance, you were not allowed to bicycle to school. Do you consider your practice subversive in this way?


My work can appear to be quite light and humorous, which therefore disguises many subversive elements. Childhood and repressed memory has played an important role in shaping certain concepts and ideas. My creative process is very much linked to physicality and movement, and therein lies the energy to extract a particular line or gesture from an idea or condition that has been set up, either by me or by the situation at hand, on a street corner or a gallery or museum wall.

In an interview, you said that physical humor was sort of a childhood coping mechanism that evolved from South Africa’s political situation at the time. Do you see this as a tradition running throughout art history as well?
 


I think that artists have over the course of history relied on various coping mechanisms in the same way as van Gogh relied on absinthe, or Picasso on the female figure. These coping mechanisms function as a means to allow us to overcome certain barriers which are sometimes mental and physical, emotional and psychological, so we adhere to a particular means for coping with the pressures and pains of our reality that is so much about inclusion and exclusion.

What is your relationship with Johannesburg like now? How often do you return to the city? And why did you decide to move to Berlin?

Though having lived in Berlin for 14 years, I view Johannesburg from a relative distance but love the city like a distant relative, and I return quite often. Johannesburg, I believe, is still a place where the avant-garde still resides. 
One discovers the avant-garde in the pockets of undefined spaces. Europe, and Berlin in particular, is too defined already, too established. It is in the geographical periphery where the new avant-garde will emerge. Political margins require artists to exercise levels of constraint—that’s where one could find, or even produce, the most interesting work. I visited Berlin on a residency in 2001 and immediately fell in love with the city, which is a kind of magnet for so many artists from around the world. Affordable rent and large spaces, the quality of life, its prominent café and bar culture (let alone nightclub culture), gives it an edge over most capitals. Berlin is grounded in art history too, from Dada to Surrealism to Bauhaus, and being able to access these histories and information as an African artist in the diaspora has been fundamental to my development.

Video still from Paries Pictus-Draw The Waves, 2015.

COURTESY THE DRAWING CENTER

In a short time, street art has gone from being an illicit practice to a relatively mainstream one. How do you feel about this change, and how has it affected your work in Berlin, Johannesburg, and other places around the world?
 


Street art has become mainstream, much like any niche market or subculture; it begins with notoriety before becoming championed by the dominant discourse of the time. The mainstream attention has probably allowed my work a lot more focus even though I do not consider myself a street artist. Neither does the art world. I have always gravitated towards street art and street culture and see many parallels between my ideas and my approach, which is to bring contemporary idea to the general public who do not necessarily visit art exhibitions or who have no real understanding of art. My approach is to afford the passersby the opportunity to access a creative process in the formation of a contemporary art concept, and to engage, or to even participate, in the idea. The power I believe is in the masses, in the people.

Of course various contexts have their own effect—I cannot compare Johannesburg to Berlin in that regard. Berlin I feel has become more complicated, but also more mainstream. Walls are covered in graffiti, but it is stylistic rather than political. It’s almost like fashion. I have had limited access to walls in Berlin, even though it is the city of walls. I have no intention of being caught by police or of becoming an anarchist in the true sense. I am more inspired by the context of Johannesburg due to the socio-political conditions of the environment. Johannesburg still has pockets of empty walls and the social interaction there is a lot different than that of Berlin.

I remember in the late ‘90s there were very little spray-painted graffiti, because people couldn’t afford cans; instead, there was mural art with strong religious and political iconography, and this, I felt, was deeply interesting as it contained a greater sense of narrative. Therefore to balance both contexts has been an interesting dilemma. For me, Berlin has become a site for research and Johannesburg a site for productive execution.

For Breaking Waves, you created waves out of minimalist semi-circles. Was this a change in style for you? Your other work is often very realistic and detailed.


I have often embraced a strong geometric approach to my work aesthetic. I attempt to foreground a physical narrative that overlays a basic geometric composition. In Breaking Waves, I incorporated fractal geometry found in West African symbolism and design—their symbol of “calm waters” uses interconnected half circles over a horizontal plane. The  semi-circles begin to blend into circles, denoting infinity, as does the character of the number 8. We see eight gradients of blue tone from left to right in the end of the artwork, with four circles positioned vertically. Numerical divisibility is key and functions as a conceptual code in many of my artworks, as does the idea of imaginary landscapes as presented in a work about the ocean in a space without water. The city of Johannesburg is completely landlocked, without water, ocean, or rivers, so the act of creating a work that so completely encapsulates the sea becomes a means to project oneself away from the given reality.

Video still from Paries Pictus-Draw The Waves, 2015.

COURTESY THE DRAWING CENTER

In what ways do you feel you’ve improved since you began your career as an artist? Have you had to progress physically, in order to pose in your photos?

I’ve become more professional through experience, which enables one to handle pressure much better and to channel that into the creative process. I also don’t become too overwhelmed by the conditions at hand. I strongly believe in exercising intuition—this becomes integral when working in the public realm, when encountering various outside influences that begin to shape the creative process. Decisions have to be made in a split second. With regards to physical performance and photography, I have had to place a larger focus on my physical wellbeing. I do physical training for certain artworks, but I also incorporate doppelgangers in many of my works. These characters are much younger than me and are therefore available to inject a youthful energy into the physical performance. Youth is of paramount importance to my working process—that lack of fear, of brushing aside any preconceptions. These qualities give rise to a spiritual freedom that we as adults are sometimes unable to reach due to our inhibitions.

Do you view your work as a form of escapism?
 

I do view my work as total escapism, for me as well as for my collaborators. We take great pleasure in the creative process and I feel quite privileged to be afforded the time to realize my artistic ideas in a collaborative manner. Nothing can be more profound than art functioning as a means to create a group identity for the purpose of being played with, or even reinvented.

Kay Hassan, Untitled, 2013, paper construction.

COURTESY JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

“It is like jazz, yes, how I make my art,” said Kay Hassan, whose exhibition “Everyday People” is currently showing at Jack Shainman Gallery’s West 20th Street location in New York. “I find that very liberating, to be open to possibilities. I rely on feelings, on my stomach, my back, if I can go to bed. If I feel it wrong, if I can’t sleep, there’s something wrong. It just comes like that, free flow. I sleep well now.”

Hassan is best known for large-scale paper constructions, which are included in the exhibition, informally hung by being stapled directly to the wall. He explained how he makes them: “In the township there are lots of billboards, for alcohol, beer, Pepsi Cola, a lot of that. What I do is I deconstruct and then construct my own forms. I just start building, ripping, and layering, until I come to a subject. It is a dry form of painting. I rely on the pixelation, colors, texture, tones, so no paint. I paint with paper.”

In addition to his free-wheeling artistic practice, Hassan brings real jazz, along with doo-wop, soul, and Motown R&B, to the gallery. Part of his installation piece, Passage of Time, includes an assemblage of vintage record players. In back of the formation is a wall of record albums from the 1950s and ’60s, whose classic songs play throughout the gallery, which he first heard growing up in South Africa at the time.

Kay Hassan, Passage of Time, 2014, vintage record and radio installation.

COURTESY JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

“I remember flashes from my childhood. Seeing John Wayne at the movies, his face with all its cracks. The music was around me then as well,” Hassan said. “As a kid, people used to go to dance halls late at night, our parents would go and they’d let us tag along. They’re driving those big cars, Chevrolets, the ’56, the ’58, those flashy cars that consume all the petrol, and the tires, those great flashing whitewall tires. Something elegant, something crisp. And people wore these outfits, men dressed up in baggy pants, felt hats, white shirts, cufflinks. Women dressed to complement the men. Dust on the clothes. When I think about the music I think about all of that, the cars and the men and the women in them, going out to be with each other in the music.”

“It was connected to this strong influence the African-American society had for South African society,” he continued. “I remember reading and hearing stories about the political situation in America, the similarities to South Africa. It gave us hope as well. I would hear MLK and Malcolm X, I heard about Mississippi. And hearing the stories and going to the cinema with my family and listening to that American jazz, all of that is together for me. This is why jazz saved us.”

Kay Hassan, Untitled, 2013-14, paper construction.

COURTESY JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

Memories, Hassan’s as well as so many strangers’, hover about the show, and the touch of another generation’s hand remains on Hassan’s vintage record sheaths, a hand-me-down history exuded in the fraying Billie Holiday cover which has been hand-stitched to keep from falling apart, or the Count Basie cover that’s taped-over in one corner and signed by a previous owner.

“This exhibition, ‘Everyday People,’ it is about objects which we carry every day,” said Hassan. “Possessions we accumulate. Some of those objects that we accumulate are passed on from generation to generation. And as you go, some generations won’t relate to the materials of their forefathers. And what do we do when we can’t relate, we tend to throw them away. I’m interested in those things we discard so easily, why do we do it, what can those materials tell us. It’s a great responsibility to me. I am the keeper of those memories.”

Unidentified photographer, Part of the crowd near the Drill Hall on the opening day of the Treason Trial, December 19, 1956, a black and white photograph in “Rise and Fall of Apartheid” at ICP.

COURTESY OF TIMES MEDIA COLLECTION, MUSEUM AFRICA, JOHANNESBURG.

“The inquiry of this exhibition,” Enwezor declares, “is to explore the degree to which photography was present at the scene of the crime.”

The exhibition includes films, publications, and other printed materials in addition to photographs by well-known names, including Roger Ballen, Peter Magubane, Kevin Carter, Guy Tillim, and Santu Mofokeng, along with many more who are not known in this country at all. Though such foreign photojournalists as Margaret Bourke-White appear in the show, the vast majority of the 70-plus photographers represented are South African. “Very few places in the world produced photographers in such numbers,” Enwezor says. “They were not on assignment. They had all the time in the world. Most were underground, they lived there, they knew the back streets, how to get into certain areas.”

Jodi Beiber, Protest against Chris Hani’s Assassination, 1993, black and white photograph. From ICP.

© GOODMAN GALLERY JOHANNESBURG.

Exploring the way these images were created, circulated, and ultimately used as regime-changers is the mission of the show. “The role of photography in the struggle against apartheid is far larger than we can really imagine,” Enwezor says. “It became one of the most persuasive, instrumental, ideological tools.”

At a time when museums have been rethinking the way they present art from regions beyond traditional centers of power—a process Enwezor has pioneered and championed—the relatively small shadow cast by apartheid in the cultural sphere shows how much territory remains to be explored. “We see so many exhibitions on Europe and D-Day,” he says. “I want people to take away that there are multiple theaters of history.”

In this country, it seems, apartheid-era photography is slowly coming into the spotlight, as two artists in the ICP show are slated for presentations at American art museums in the coming year. The first, opening at SFMOMA in December, is “South Africa in Apartheid and After.” It’s a collaboration between photo curator Sandra Phillips and David Goldblatt, éminence gris of South African photographers, who chose the work of two of his countrymen, Ernest Cole and Billy Monk, to hang alongside his own.

Ernest Cole, Naked Men (During group medical examination the nude men are herded through a string of doctors’ offices), a black and white photograph from his 1967 book House of Bondage.

@ THE ERNEST COLE FAMILY TRUST./COURTESY OF THE HASSELBLAD FOUNDATION.

Cole sometimes worked with former New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, then the paper’s Johannesburg correspondent, on commissions. But most of his work “was self-assigned, with the idea of getting it published abroad,” Lelyveld recounted on the phone from the Democratic National Convention. “It was too hot to be published in South Africa.” On the pretext that he was going on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, Cole left the country, and brought his photos to Magnum. The result was the book House of Bondage, published by Random House in 1967 and soon banned in South Africa. “It got a lot of attention, but attention lasts for 15 minutes,” says Lelyveld. “Then Ernest was stranded. He never found a path to go forward.” Though Lelyveld, who had been expelled from South Africa in 1966, helped smuggle out Cole’s negatives, they later disappeared when Cole drifted into homelessness in New York. The photographer died in poverty in 1990.

Ernest Cole, Boys (location is possibly Mamelodi), black and white photograph. The image is in “Ernest Cole, Photographer,” a retrospective that launches its U.S. tour at the Fowler next spring.

@ THE ERNEST COLE FAMILY TRUST./COURTESY OF THE HASSELBLAD FOUNDATION.

Billy Monk, The Catacombs, 31 July 1967, 1967, printed 2011, gelatin silver print. From “South Africa in Apartheid and After” at SFMOMA.

© ESTATE OF BILLY MONK./COURTESY OF STEVENSON, CAPE TOWN AND JOHANNESBURG.

The ICP exhibition marks his first U.S. showing. “He certainly had an eye, and applied it in a place that was quite extraordinary, especially in South Africa at that time,” says Goldblatt, describing the portraits as having “an intimacy that went beyond the obvious.”

These upcoming projects reflect a shift back in time from the post-apartheid era, which has been widely showcased in U.S. art museums in recent years. “The focus on post-apartheid strikes me as a-historical, in a weird way,” says Enwezor. “This exhibition is really to shift the focus slightly in a different direction.”

He argues that while photography of course existed in South Africa before apartheid, South African photography emerged in 1948. Pre-apartheid photography “in many ways was the province of the dominant European gaze on the African world,” Enwezor says, reflecting a kind of frisson in recording “the border of civility and primitivism.” That border collapsed after 1948, the year the government policy of racial segregation began, and a more indigenous style of photography “came to assert its place in the field of vision.”

As he brought the images together, Enwezor was struck by the transformations they document. Gestures change from the thumbs-up of the early nonviolent protests to the raised, clenched fist of the activists of the ’60s and beyond. The language of protest signs, which get their own section in the show, evolves from “dialogue to confrontation.” The funeral space becomes a locus not only of mourning but also of solidarity.

Greame Williams, The ’94 Election. South Africa, Soweto, 1994, color photograph. From ICP.

© GREAME WILLIAMS./COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

The country hasn’t produced so many conceptual artists, Goldblatt notes. “There is a fine-art movement here but it’s much more muted than it is in the States,” comments the photographer, who founded Johannesburg’s Market Photo Workshop in 1989. “People here take photos here largely because they’ve got something to say about this place and their lives.”

David Goldblatt, Meeting of the worker-management Liaison Committee of the Colgate-Palmolive Company, 1980, gelatin silver print. From “South Africa in Apartheid and After.”

© DAVID GOLDBLATT./COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GOODMAN GALLERY.

“The situation here is quite grim,” he continues. “We’re going to have to face some very serious social questions that won’t be easily solved or ameliorated. I’ve no doubt this will stimulate an outpouring of anger and frustration.

“I have no doubt,” he adds, “we’ll see photography that will attempt to deal with some of these things.”

During the half-century of apartheid (1948–94), even during the hardcore repression beginning in 1960s that stifled free expression, prints with political content were being made all over South Africa by artists of diverse backgrounds. Portable, readily multiplied and disseminated, and often involving networks of artists and producers, they escaped the kind of scrutiny directed at more monumental, attention-grabbing art forms. They were also effective tools of resistance, used to organize and incite.

The exhibition includes nearly 100 prints, posters, books and wall stencils by some 30 artists and collectives. It includes examples by William Kentridge, an avid printmaker, as well as the late Robert Hodgins (1920–2010), the collective BitterKomix and—a surprise in screenprint—the photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa. But many names will be unfamiliar to viewers from outside South Africa. Within the country, such figures as John Muafangejo, who worked at the radical workshop and school at Rorke’s Drift in KwazuluNatal in the early 1970s, are much revered. So is his colleague Azaria Mbatha (b. 1941). One of two Mbatha prints, a black-and-white linocut donated to MoMA in 1967—its first South African print acquisition—is typical of the Rorke’s Drift iconography in fusing Christian and indigenous themes.

Black-and-white linocut, with its dramatic contrasts of light and dark, are among the most vivid prints on view. They were popular throughout the period covered and are generously represented in the show. In a recent example, the sculptor and filmmaker Vuyile C. Voyiya’s “Black and Blue” series (2005) shows a dynamic male nude twisting in space, lit up in the darkness by stippling. “It references some earlier work by Voyiya about a man moving around to avoid the police,” said Hecker. Born in 1961, Voyiya “bridges the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.”

There are some lyrical, less obviously incendiary images in the prints on view—for example, Claudette Schreuders’s enigmatic figures in a group of lithographs from 2003 based on her wooden sculptures. But a good deal of the imagery is quite harrowing: Jo Ratcliffe’s snarling dogs in a dump, done in photolithography and screenprint (Nadir 15, 1987–88), which allude to the terrors of the time; or Diane Victor’s ongoing intaglio series “Disasters of Peace” (begun in 2001), with its nightmarish, somewhat surreal scenes of trials, domestic life, hospitals and other vignettes that argue that all is not rosy in post-apartheid South Africa. The series evokes Goya and Dix in more than title alone.

MoMA began collecting South African prints in earnest in 2005, after Hecker made her first trip there, and this exhibition offers just a sampling of the many works acquired since. The department already owned important examples by William Kentridge, an avid printmaker, which the museum began purchasing in the mid-1990s. Kentridge is represented here by, among other works, his Beckmann-esque General, an ominous, ultra-decorated official leveling a baleful stare, from 1993. “I could see there was so much quality artistic activity there besides Kentridge,” said Hecker. “I went in 2004, which was a fantastic year to go, because it was 10 years after the end of apartheid and the Nelson Mandela election. I went to public and private workshops, covering all strata of printmaking, from high-end to university presses and community-based initiatives in urban and rural areas. It was Art History 101 for the new South Africa.”