SA’s pride and prejudice at London show

It is the exhibition South Africans have been waiting for: charting the country’s visual expression over the past 100,000 years. However, South Africa: Art of a Nation is being staged at the British Museum in London.

It is a landmark exhibition not only because of its historical breadth, but also in the manner in which the curators attempted to “decolonise” their collection. However, while their compensatory gesture is interesting, it is fraught with contradictions.

The mega-show will enlighten the British and tourists about history that predates and extends beyond the likes of William Kentridge or Marlene Dumas — the two domestic artists most wellknown internationally.

“Shows like this reposition the country in a global context, which it doesn’t get through its own efforts,” says Stefan Hundt, curator of the Sanlam art collection and art adviser to Sanlam Wealth’s clientele.

It takes a certain kind of cultural arrogance for an institution belonging to a former colonial power to tell the history of a nation it once conquered and exploited.

“We do not shy away from Britain’s problematic colonial legacy. Although this exhibition is for an international audience, it will expand the British visiting public’s knowledge of British involvement in colonial SA, of which little is widely known,” says Dr John Giblin, head curator of the Africa section at the British Museum.

The exhibition charts SA’s visual history before the colonial era, beginning a narrative from 1220 AD with the history of Mapungubwe, evoked through the loan of gold figures excavated from royal graves in that region.

This era and the extraordinary artefacts from it — such as the seminal gold rhinoceros — allows the British Museum to demonstrate that “complex societies existed in the region immediately prior to the arrival of European settlers”, as they state in their media release.

These acts of redress, or processes of decolonising the archive, are fraught with contradictions and political traps. But the narrative the exhibition presents will not bypass or gloss over Britain’s colonial relationship with SA, says Giblin.

One section will be dedicated to showing early British colonisation of SA through “explorer art”. There will be references to colonial conflicts such as the Xhosa Frontier Wars, the AngloZulu War, and the Second South African War — including artworks focusing on British concentration camps.

With institutions under pressure to “decolonise” history, museums face the challenge of reinventing themselves.

“I think they are trying to present the museum as one of universal culture that everyone has access to, without fear of prejudice and ridicule,” says Hundt.

“It is trying to shake off that old image of a racist museum, rooted in practices of digging up places and putting them on display as a nationalistic act.

“I think they are trying to show that their mandate extends beyond the ethnological.”

Ethnological material from the British Museum’s collection includes objects of material culture, such as beaded items and sculptures by anonymous artists, which are paired with contemporary artworks to recategorise them as art.

This was attempted in SA through exhibitions such as Ezakwantu, beadwork from the Eastern Cape (by Emma Bedford at the South African National Gallery in 1993), Engaging Modernities: Transformations of the Commonplace (Anitra Nettleton, Julia Charlton and Fiona Rankin-Smith in 2003) and Dungamanzi (Nessa Leibhammer, Natalie Knight and Billy Makhubele at the Joburg Art Gallery in 2008).

The results were mixed; often the material came attached to troublesome ethnic labels and the lack of interest and support from black South Africans implied that elevating these objects to art advanced white objectification of black life.

“We have chosen to address it [these issues] by only selecting objects that were created with clear symbolic values beyond the purely utilitarian and thus can be considered artworks,” says Giblin. “Throughout the exhibition all the artworks are given the same respect, and where the artist’s name was not recorded, this is made explicit.

“We also face the biases inherent in the ethnographic collection of these artworks headon through the interpretative information provided and through the selection of contemporary and historic artworks that challenge early ethnographic collecting practices.”

In South Africa: Art of a Nation, historical works are juxtaposed with contemporary pieces by artists including Willie Bester, Karel Nel and Mary Sibande.

“Nel created Potent Fields, with its two planes of red and white ochre, in the same year as the discovery of the approximately 75,000-year-old crosshatched ochre at Blombos Cave in the Western Cape. This discovery repositioned southern Africa, not Europe, as one of the earliest sites of artistic thought and creation,” says Giblin.

Whatever the approach to “decolonising” the collection or museology practices, the result will inevitably be uncomfortable, says Hundt. He believes, however, it is easier for a British institution to attempt to do so. “They just don’t have the same baggage as we do. We have just stopped doing this kind of work.”

He says public art institutions in SA do not have the resources or political will to stage such a comprehensive exhibition.