South Africa: the Art of a Nation
I loved the first
section on the ancient art of the area. As it is one of the places where human
life began so it is also one of the areas where art began. I was moved by a
small pebble with natural markings like a face. This demonstrated the first
stage of artistic sensibility, collecting objects which mean something to you,
called nominid curiosity. This stone was found in a cave with human remains. It
hadn’t come from the surrounding area so must have been found and kept by those
people.
The show also
took you through the other stages from decorating objects and bodies including
a necklace of shells which is some of the earliest evidence of body decoration,
through to one of the earliest pieces of 2D art, a wonderful antelope type
animal scratched onto a rock.
The history of
the area was told well through the art and I finally understand the Boer War.
It had always been a bit of a mystery to me why the British and Dutch went to
the area and ended up fighting each other. There were some lovely sketches of
Boer settlers and a British soldier’s jacket on which he had drawn pictures of
his experiences.
In the later
sections I was fascinated in the wonderful brightly coloured clothes worn by
black workers during apartheid and the idea of making people who were supposed
to be invisible visible. Also the wonderful array of anti-apartheid badges.
I liked the way
contemporary art was used throughout the show to illustrate the themes and show
how current artists were reacting to their past. The most striking was the
final tableaux by Mary Sibande consisting of two figures both based on her own
body. On representing her grandmother in a Victorian maids outfit and the other
in purple representing modern women and freedom.
Closes on 26
February 2017.
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