Casspir the Spoek heads for faraway haunts in US
● Adorned in millions of colourful glass beads, the Casspir — a once reviled symbol of apartheid — is poised to take its place on the world’s stage as a lauded work of art.
Spoek 1 left the port of Durban for New York earlier this month, where it will be exhibited at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair by South Africa-born artist Ralph Ziman.
The LA-based artist and his team took two years to transform the Casspir into a “less threatening” beaded wonder, which was unveiled at the Iziko South African National Art Gallery in 2016.
Since then Spoek 1 — onto which 65 million beads were hand-woven — has enjoyed pride of place at local exhibitions. After arriving in the US, the wheeled fortress’s first stop will be Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York.
“After that we plan to tour more of the US and the world,” said Ziman.
“As much as we want to confront our collective past as South Africans, we also want to tell the story of the Casspir moving forward.
“The Casspir might have disappeared off the streets of South Africa in 1994, but the same year the arms boycott was lifted certain companies were free to sell the vehicles abroad.”
Ziman said he wanted to Africanise the Casspir, to “own it”.
“By transforming it from military vehicle to sculpture tells the story, past, present and future, showing the Casspir in a new light. We wanted to sew one bead for every South African, man, woman and child.”
The Casspir was developed and designed in South Africa in the late 1970s after an arms embargo on the apartheid government. The vehicles were used to assert dominance and were feared by oppressed South Africans.
“The Casspir was obviously one of the most visible and ubiquitous symbols of apartheid. Part of what we did was to take it into townships like Soweto and talk to residents about their memories of the Casspir in particular, and apartheid in general.”
Ziman believes that by making the Casspir less threatening “we are able to open a dialogue between people who were on opposite sides of apartheid and between those who remember and those who are too young to know about the oppression”.
Ziman, who refused to divulge how much was spent transforming Spoek 1, is expecting it to be well received in the US.
Transnet Port Terminals, which has been given the task of handling Spoek 1’s passage, said the job was an “interesting challenge”.