Grahamstown National Arts Festival
by Kim Gurney
If Grahamstown's annual arts festival is a valid barometer of visual arts in this country, issues of heritage are taking center stage as artists consider the past 10 years of democracy. According to festival committee member Andrew Verster, artists are pondering their own identity and trying to find out where they fit in.
'Last year,' he says, 'a common theme was examining home as a place where things happen � This year, it seems to be about heritage and us as people, where we fit in and what we believe.'
Apartheid might be scrapped but its legacy lives on as we attempt to come to terms with the past and forge a new identity for the future. So what does a young white male suspended naked by his ankles from a wooden structure say about life in the New South Africa?
Peter van Heerden, a Cape Town drama student, made himself into a permanent 'live art' installation for the duration of the festival. This included inverting himself every evening with head literally in the sand as part of a hard-hitting performance piece called So is 'n Os Gemaak.
Small audiences sipping sherry watched Van Heerden enact the disempowerment of the white male in a gripping 45-minute solo. In between, Van Heerden lived in an ox-wagon in his makeshift laager next to the historic Fort Selwyn. Each day had a different theme, from 'Reconciliation Day' to 'Family Day' and my personal favourite, 'Kakpraatdag'.
His aim was to investigate white masculinity in a post-apartheid nation and to inspire dialogue and discussion. In that, he certainly succeeded.
Other artists nearby were doing a similar thing, if in less dramatic fashion. Printmaker Paul Emmanuel exhibited an intriguing installation in an open space adjacent to the Monument, which explored male identity with reference to militarism and patriarchy.
'The Lost Men' comprised a few rows of flag-like voile suspended from wires. At first glance, they resembled washing blowing in the wind. The ephemeral nature of Emmanuel's installation, which acts as a memorial, made a striking contrast with the 1970s monolithic Monument.
On closer inspection, the voile bore images of various close-ups of Emmanuel's naked body with names cast in lead type embossed temporarily onto the skin. The names commemorate soldiers who died in one of the frontier wars in the area 200 years ago, with black soldiers often only identified by a single name or a clan reference.
Emmanuel said the work was triggered by personal loss as well as broader concerns like the Iraq war. He added: 'This memorial installation is an expression of my experience. It's a mourning of memory and broken relationships.' During the festival, a sangoma visited Emmanuel's installation to perform a ritual to help heal the wounds of the past.
This issue of whether a place carries traces of its history was also evident in the work of Kathryn Smith, Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year.
Her show in the Monument, called 'Euphemism', was also in a sense about history - though not peculiarly South African history. In her own forensic manner, Smith took as her starting point the murders of Jack the Ripper in Victorian England. According to Verster, Smith's preoccupation with crime and death has something to do with the idea that every object has a history, associations, a past, all of which the artist unravels.
But it was not only white artists exploring issues of heritage. An exhibition curated by Moleleki Frank Ledimo called 'Ndyindoda: Initiation as a rite of passage' was a multi-media show that included video, photographs, and actual objects used in initiation rites. It provoked much controversy. Some critics felt it undermined the secrecy of the practice and others felt it was insensitively staged.
Much consternation seemed to centre on Churchill Madikida's work. His large photographs of an initiation enactment were too graphic for some. The show's curatorial short-comings aside, media reports at the time regarding the death of a number of Eastern Cape initiates only echoed the need to speak about some concerns raised by the artist.
Other artworks explored heritage in less controversial ways. In the Monument itself, Painter Leigh Voigt depicted a series of Nguni cattle in a celebration of the Zulu culture to which they belong. Naming Nguni cattle is a complex process which involves subtle reference to the natural world and this process is intimately connected to Zulu oral history and poetry.
Above Voigt's work, the 120-metre Keiskamma Tapestry framed the wall. This visually appealing embroidered visualisation of Xhosa history was created over several months by a collective of 120 women from the Hamburg region near Pedi in the Eastern Cape.
As Verster says, such exhibitions are important explorations of heritage and help to differentiate ourselves in an increasingly homogenised world. He adds: 'We must preserve what is ours and who we are. This is our kind of protest against standardisation and anonymity.'
