Diversity
During the Apartheid years, the SABC Art Collection was informally managed, and was dominated by conventional landscapes, still lifes and portraits – mostly by white artists, due to an acquisition strategy that enacted the structural racism and exclusion that underpinned South African society at large. Many of the works acquired during this period reflect colonial and Apartheid values and ways of seeing, from the colonial trope of the depopulated landscape to the exoticism of the tribalised other and the idyll of Cape Dutch architecture.
Even so, the realities and textures of everyday South African life during the 19th and 20th centuries are recorded in certain artworks that represent, for instance, the landing of settlers in Algoa Bay in 1820; the streets of Bo Kaap; District Six before the forced removals; urban architecture and street life; township scenes; farms and rural homesteads; washing lines, windmills and electricity poles; boats and fishing communities; rivers, mountains, trees and plants; domesticated animals, farmed animals and so-called wildlife… These works can be read and interpreted as much through the details of South African life witnessed, observed and transmuted within the frame as through the blind spots and erasures that haunt it. The works created and collected during this initial period reflect the trajectory of changing European traditions from the 1850s onwards – from directly representational Realism through Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism and Cubism into Dada, Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism and onwards. Works acquired in this first phase of the Collection’s history, include some significant works by JH Pierneef, Maggie Laubser and Irma Stern, as well as a particularly strong work by Gerard Sekoto.
The Bantu Education Act of 1955 barred Black South Africans from receiving formal art training. Informal art centres, funded by European states, became one of the few avenues by means of which Black South African artists could advance their practice. Throughout this period, from 1947 to the mid-1990s, the artists who received this informal training began passing on their knowledge to younger generations of artists.
After the Soweto uprising of 1976, a new social consciousness emerged that retaliated against the government’s policy of segregation and blanket classification of Black South African art as ‘craft’. New forms of art evolved on the mines and in the townships, using everything from plastic strips to bicycle spokes, as artists kept on changing and adapting to a society in a time of radical resistance and change.
After the restructuring of the SABC following South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, the Collection was formalised under a curator, Koulla Xinisteris, and allocated a small budget towards the acquisition of artworks on a basis more befitting of our new democracy. The work of Black artists was grossly under-represented in the original Collection, so our acquisition policy has consciously sought to address this structural discrimination and exclusion. In around 2002, our acquisitions budget was substantially increased, enabling us to acquire numerous iconic works by both emerging and established Black artists – as well as legacy works by earlier generations of Black artists.
The SABC Art Collection is now one of the most impressive assemblies of both historical and contemporary work by Black South African artists. We have been fortunate to acquire significant works by the urban township painters from the 1940s (such as Ephraim Ngatane, Durant Sihlali and Andrew Motjuoadi), the graphic artists of the Rorke’s Drift Art Centre (Cyprian Shilakoe and Dan Rakgoathe), as well as the sculptures and drawings of Sydney Kumalo, Isaac Sithole and Ezrom Legae, the pathbreaking drawings of Dumile Feni and Julian Motau, and the sculpture of Jackson Hlungwane and Noria Mabasa, to name but a few.
Following the global financial crisis of 2008, our acquisitions budget was frozen and has remained so due to ongoing financial constraints within the SABC as a whole, so since then the team has focused its energies on exhibiting, restoring, loaning and exciting interest in the works held within the Collection.
The South African contemporary scene is as culturally diverse and defiantly expressive as South Africa itself and, on a global scale, contemporary South African art is highly sought-after. Although it is not always political, conversations stemming from its interpretation are rarely apolitical.
‘Works of art can articulate particular moments in the life of a nation. Not all South Africa’s visual artists had the liberty, the means or the will to connect their work to the politics of national liberation, or to hold a critical light up to their nation’s potential,’ writes Gavin Jantjes in the Preface to the Visual Century series (Wits University Press & the Visual Century Project, 2011). ‘But those artists whose work did make these statements have become actors in the making of history, and their work is testimony to historical progress. Whether a rock painting, a wood sculpture or a video projection, such works have provided insights into how South African view themselves in their social and cultural environments.’