The political is personal for an artist setting out to redress the whitewashing of history. By
portfolio of really terribly drawn artworks” to the Michaelis School of Fine Art and was accepted.
He thought he’d study photography and design but he soon “had my mind blown sideways by the power of sculpture” and studied under Jane Alexander. These days he says that “activism is my hobby and art is my job”.
When he began preparing for this show two years ago, Gunn-Salie — thinking about the purple dye used by the apartheid government in water cannons against protesters — planned “acts of vandalism around a series of colonial-era monuments around the country using purple dye”. Before he could execute this, something happened to the statue of a certain empire builder on the campus of the University of Cape Town and GunnSalie could only watch in approval from Johannesburg where he now lives, thinking that at least he’d learnt a “big lesson about planning too far in advance, but I was like ‘Amandla!’ and ‘Rhodes must fall’, and so must the perpetuation of a colonial heritage that is unquestioned in our society”.
The Rhodes Must Fall movement showed him something he hadn’t thought about, “the implicit violence within vandalism”, and so he had to think again and not “just replicate what others had done but take the debate to another level and explain the problem behind these figures in our society through more than just shit-flinging or paintflinging”.
The result of this rethink is
Soft Vengeance , a series of sculptural works of the arms of colonial-era sculptures of figures from Bartolomeu Dias to Jan van Riebeeck and Cecil Rhodes, cast in urethane and painted deep red, emphasising the blood their legacies have left on their hands. The bodies of these men are implied through their absence beyond the walls on which their arms hang. For Gunn-Salie the series addresses the debate about memorialisation and heritage in the wake of the events at UCT.
He admits that while he “may be using a commercial art gallery to make a memorial, I’m exposing a gap in the history and exposing a lack of principle in our heritage landscape. I think about [Dali Tambo’s] memorial park that’s going to happen and that’s something that I don’t agree with and I hope I’m trying to counter those tendencies.”
This attempt to redress the imbalance of the post-apartheid heritage landscape is particularly evident in Amongst Men, the overwhelming central piece of the show, consisting of about 450 individually cast kufiya suspended from the ceiling of the gallery. They create a kind of plastic sculptural hanging garden through which visitors can walk, inhabiting in the present the absent figures of the past in a recreation of a scene from the funeral of Imam Abdullah Haron, an antiapartheid Muslim cleric and Pan Africanist Congress supporter who was killed by the Security Branch in 1969.
Designed using an overhead newspaper photograph showing some of the 40 000 mourners who attended Haron’s funeral, the kufiya meet around an empty space, taken up in the photo by the imam’s body. It’s accompanied by a recording of poet James Matthews’s reading his poem Patriot or Terrorist, written at the time.
A separate work created in collaboration with the imam’s widow, Galiema Haron, is based on a photo of her husband in his funeral shroud. Gunn-Salie has cast the sculpture using his own body. The piece is titled Smile-cries because Galiema told Gunn-Salie that upon seeing her husband’s body in the morgue it seemed to her that one side of his face was crying and the other smiling.
A third piece created in collaboration with the imam’s daughter Fatiema Haron-Masoet, who was only six when her father died, consists of a hand-blown light bulb hung from the ceiling at a child’s height.
Amongst Men is also a deeply personal work that reflects layers of narrative that have impacted on Gunn-Salie’s life. He recalls that his father, who attended the funeral when he was 12 years old, “sat there looking into the imam’s grave and personally pledged vengeance for his assassination. Twenty years later he took up arms and joined MK and did just that with those thoughts of his 12-year-old self present in his mind.”
He also named his son after the imam. Gunn-Salie describes the work as an “anti-memorial” and hopes that his exhibition will challenge audiences to think about the whitewashing of history through their experiences with work by an artist who sees himself as “someone who is trying to spread a corrective history and question how far we have come”. LS
“History After Apartheid” is at the Goodman Gallery until September 19