Artist takes dim view of modern burial practices

Art of dying installation is final year project for master’s degree

TINY coffins fill two large rooms of the Ann Bryant Art Gallery. Some are laid out on a large low table among glowing tealight candles, while next door they tumble from a machine into a grassy grave.

The macabre installation is the final year art project of Warrant Officer Siphe Potelwa’s master’s in visual arts degree at Unisa.

The arty cop, who works as a facial identification expert/identikit artist at the SAPS forensics department in King William’s Town, is using his multi-media exhibition to highlight societal pressure to lay on expensive and ostentatious funerals and the crippling financial implications of the practice.

A skilful ceramicist and sculptor, he made 150 of the little coffins himself, while a photographic slide show consists of photographs he has taken at funerals.

“My exhibition critiques the extravagance associated with the burial practice of the modern Xhosa,” he explained.

“People who cannot afford it feel obliged to spend a lot of money on funerals, but it is the service providers like caterers, decorators and designers who benefit from this.

“I mean, what is the use of a floral arc [arbour] that costs R450? And, even if you were to buy a casket that costs R200 000, it still goes into the ground.”

Potelwa, 34, said he was inspired to research the growing trend of lavish funerals after watching a video of his father’s 1998 funeral in Dutywa.

“My father was the bread winner and my mother a domestic worker and so my big brother had to leave college to work and pay for the funeral at which there was a lot of food and slaughtering. At the time I thought it was normal.”

But now he is emphatically opposed to extravagant funerals and the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality.

“In my research I attended a number of funerals in the [former] Transkei. People wear high heels and expensive clothes and it’s all about eating and gossip.

“But then the poor family goes to a micro-lender to pay for it all.

“Funerals should be respectful with a simple coffin, but people pay for a big casket in marine wood for the comfort of the deceased. But there’s no comfort to the family if they are paying R27 000 for it.”

Potelwa said his installation had received mostly favourable responses from visitors.

“They thanked me for exposing these practices. To those who say it is insulting to our culture I ask: how, because these are modern people who are doing this.”

● The Unisa Master’s in Visual Arts exhibition is up until May 20.