international reviews

The four larger works each make salient certain issues that are raised within the narrative of the smaller, sequential panels. This narrative begins with a group of khaki-clad white soldiers shooting rifles at a surrendering group of black men. Following a panel that shows the soldiers’ celebration, we see a lone member of the white troop going for a walk in a forest where he falls asleep under a tree. He dreams of an angelic black woman in a dress and cloak who leads him up a ladder into the heavens where they become sexually intimate. We see the clothed man embrace the naked woman while a devil rips the woman’s soul from her chest so that the man is left with her corpse in his arms. The woman appears to bleed away her ‘colour’ until her body is left a ghostly white while, in the reverse, the man’s skin gains the grey-black colour of his tears as he cries next to her grave. The man is woken from his dream to find that his entire troop has been massacred. In his grief, our lonely soldier wanders across a desert and calls out for the sacred ladder in the clouds. He is, instead, given a different ladder against a tree:  he uses it to hang himself.

The distinctly biblical overtones woven into this narrative seem to place the lonely soldier in the role of the disciple Judas, who betrayed Jesus for a few coins (and later, wracked with guilt, took his life); the black woman plays Jesus to this antihero’s Judas. Their sexual intimacy is akin, perhaps, to ‘the kiss of death’ that Judas is said to have given Jesus in order to identify him to the religious authorities.

Botes’ narrative also resonates with the biblical story of Jacob who dreams of a ladder into the heavens, presided over by angels. In his prophetic dream, God promises him and his descendents both his protection and the land that surrounds him. This notion of a divine right to land for a ‘chosen people’ is reminiscent of the fervent belief of apartheid’s religious sanctioning by such figures as Terre’Blanche himself.

Yet Botes undermines a conclusive understanding of his images; the complex layers of symbolism are loaded with contradictions. This is not an easy depiction of sinners and saints. His symbols are literally layered over the outlines of the drawings in repeated colours and patterns, resulting in the production of his own visual alphabet. In the larger work, Origin (2010) for instance, a squatting devil excretes a sea of red outlines that form ghostly characters covering the floor to read like seeping blood. These characters find their echo on the skin of the hanging man depicted in Blood Money (2010) and in the air of the room in House of Judas (2010) where they appear to be demonic reminders of past transgressions polluting the memory of the Judas figure. The title of Black Dog (2010) alludes to the racial violence implicit in the narrative of Land of Judas (indeed in South African history) while its image of a man on all fours, seemingly waiting to be punished, presents us with both a victim and scapegoat/dog.

‘House of Judas’ presents another triumph for Botes, whose work manages to pierce the damaged skin of South African history and uncover its complex demons while at the same time spewing forth the possibility of catharsis through understanding. The exhibition was well curated and uncanny in its ability to foreshadow current political tensions.