South Africa: the Art of a Nation

Interesting exhibition at the British Museum looking at the art and people of southern Africa.

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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