'Uncontained: opening the Community Arts Project archive'
Various Artists at Iziko South African National Gallery‘Uncontained: opening the Community Arts Project archive’, is the first exhibition of artworks from the CAP and AMAC (Arts and Media Access Centre) archive, which consists of over 4000 paintings, prints, posters, sculptures and drawings.
Featuring a selection of mostly linocut prints from the turbulent 1980s, many are visualisations of the anti-apartheid struggle, and exist not simply as personal expressions, but as interventions to create awareness about people’s resolve to overcome their oppression and dehumanization.
As reminders of an era in which artists responded to a crisis of the human condition resulting from apartheid, these resistance works also offer us the possibility for thinking about the post-apartheid present. In both respects, they invite a re-imagining of political society in the face of unemployment, poverty, disease, unequal education, persistent racial divisions and new class polarisations. They also draw attention to the silence of cultural resistance in contemporary times.
The exhibition, however, is not limited to narratives of resistance and issues of politics as it presents a broad array of subjects and concerns. As such, the show provides open-ended and complex narratives about human experience, imagination, and social and personal relations in the world of apartheid and in its aftermaths.
16 August - 30 September
