Arts festival revives the memories of SA’s ‘painful’ history

HISTORY might be another country as the saying goes, but in Grahamstown during the National Arts Festival, you somehow keep finding yourself face-to-face with this other country of ours. From documents, to old paintings, photographs, dated footage and illustrations from the late 1800s, artists at the festival keep dragging visitors back in time.

As the title to Kemang Wa Lehulere’s exhibition, Dreamer Imaginist: History will Break Your Heart suggests, works evoking our history make for painful contemplation. The winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art deals with the history of two prominent black artists – Ernest Mancoba and Gladys Mgudlandlu.

It is not that the history books have forgotten these two painters but, unlike Wa Lehulere and his contemporaries, their journey for recognition and the path they travelled to gain visibility and acceptance by not only the art world but the societies they lived in, was thwarted because of their race. In this way Wa Lehulere uses his moment of glory to reflect on that of artists who escaped it.

Artist Monique Pelser turns the lens on her own family history, presenting a collection of things, from an old family album, chests and other items that once belonged to her father, a policeman during the apartheid era.

Michael Godby digs a bit further back in history with the exhibition Battleground, where he presents illustrations and other artefacts pertaining to the War of the Axe, which took place in the mid-1800s in and around Grahamstown. Belying these refined drawings are bloody battles showing the colonials revelling in their defeat of the indigenous population.

And then there was former president Nelson Mandela’s voice speaking those now famous lines during the Treason Trial, where he asserts that he is willing to die for his belief in racial equality, which was played during an extraordinary jazz concert, Kesivan Naidoo’s Kesivan and the Lights.