Post-apartheid Guernica exhibition by Sharlene Khan and Mokgabudi Amos Letsoalo at Johannesburg Art Gallery
The national Lockdown alert level one feels
like letting the prisoners out of the incarceration after long years of
loneliness and less contact with the ordinary life. There is no exception with
the art lovers who have not gathered in a long time and now are afforded the
opportunity to mingle over a glass of wine, juice and water to those who enjoy
not imbibing the brewed holy waters. On Sunday the 10th of October
2021 at Johannesburg Art Gallery, one of the buzzing art galleries in South
Africa – trapped in the middle of a busy taxi rand and ever congested Joubert
Park, opened a two person’s exhibition by Professor Sharlene Khan and Mokgabudi Amos
Letsoalo.
An exhibition coined Post-apartheid Guernica is interesting to walk into a gallery driven by the marriage of two worded title. Post-apartheid obviously brings one back home to South Africa’s present state of regime whilst Guernica travels you to a town in northern Spain called Basque which was bombed and destroyed in 1937 by German planes helping the insurgents in the Spanish Civil War. Apartheid, a system of institutionalised racial seperation introduced in 1948 and lasted through 1994, is a word most black South Africans, past and present wish not to hear. It was formerly instituted into governance by Henry Verwoerd who is regarded as the architect of apartheid in 1958.
Artists mirror the everyday life and
wellbeing of their societies and there is no exception with the revisit and
recapturing of the Marikana Massacre by Khan and Lestoalo in their first
installment duet. Burrowing from famous title of a painting by Picasso which was
created in response to the war, so is this exhibition responding to the
Marikana massacre almost a decade on. For politicians, this massacre was
romanticized as tragedy or a mere incident but for activists, artists and the
family of the workers who lost their lives in the crossfire know it in their
hearts that it was a massacre that took away the innocent lives.
Walking into the installation room of this
exhibition, you are greeted by a reverberating famous speech by the former president
of the first democratic South Africa Nelson Mandela: ‘Never, never and never
again’. Examining the part of this historical speech delivered on his
presidential inauguration in 1994, one wonders if Mandela’s fellow comrades
within the African National Congress listened to their most senior leader’s
words when he said: “Never, never and never again shall it be that this
beautiful land will experience the oppression of one by the other”. The
massacre occurred under the Mandela’s ruling party and prior to that there were
pockets of police killings that were not given enough public scrutiny and most
notably the Andries Tatane’s killing. He was a 33-year-old South African
citizen who was shot and killed by police officers during a service delivery
protest in Ficksburg. Though described as “a watershed moment in public
perceptions of state violence after apartheid” it has emerged that this was not
an isolated police brutality and the Independent Complaints Directorate has
investigated 1 769 separate brutal killings of people in police custody mere
three years prior to Tatane’s killing. This is a clear indication that violence
by one against the other is here to stay. The police officers do not worry
about the consequences being brought to the forefront and action taken the
police officers because the then National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele’s
statement in the late August 2010 that police officers should ‘shoot to kill’.
This multi-layered digital exhibition is a
combination of animation, charcoal drawings, collages, sonics and texts. What
grabs audience eyes initially as you enter the room is the sound coming from
the speakers on the projected screen and the depiction of 10 police officers
armed to the teeth in the foreground, the animated screening in the
middle-ground and two full sheets of beautiful charcoal drawings with touch of
collage in the background. There is on the screen an assortment of animated
chicks and hens, dogs, cats, pigs, rhino and human figure carrying firewood –
this is punctuated by the donkey hauling a cart of what looks like precious
minerals, in this case of Marikana the minerals would be palladium, rhodium and
gold(4E). The oppression is not only depicted by the donkey doing the pulling
but by also the human figure of able-bodied man carrying a huge stalks of
firewood in his arms, limping. These are but few metaphorical objects employed
to take us on the journey as articulated by the artists’ mission statement
which stipulates that the exhibition “primarily references the Marikana
massacre of 44 miners by the South African Police Service on the 16th
of August 2012 during the protests for increased wages. Not since the days of
apartheid has South Africa witnessed such public slaughter of civilians engaged
in social protests, but this was the culmination of many different incidents
were black lives are wasted by the police force.”
In conclusion there is a session that concludes this important exhibition about one of the fateful even post democratic South Africa. Interesting also is the fact that 2022 marks a decade since 44 people were killed in Marikana by the state police services. The session in a form or performance will be as follows:
Come Home: A Call
"The performance Come Home – A Call focuses attention on the effects of violence on the families of victims, in particular women. Women who have been left behind, women who wait, women who cry, women who mourn in the everyday ordinariness of extraordinary violence. This performance pays homage to a history of faded pictures." - Professor Sharlene Khan.
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