This sculpture was made in 2003 at the height of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, when a disease that was eating away at the innards of the country went largely unseen and unspoken, shrouded in denialism, until it began to show up in welts and Kaposi’s sarcoma (one of the most common cancers in people living with HIV) on the bodies of those afflicted by it.

In Love’s Ballast I (2003) the surface of the painting is marked by irregular shapes reminiscent of scars or boils. This work was made in 2003 at the height of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, when a disease that was eating away at the innards of the country went largely unseen and unspoken, shrouded in denialism, until it began to show up in welts and Kaposi’s sarcoma (one of the most common cancers in people living with HIV) on the bodies of those afflicted by it.

In the Skin and Ghosts (2006) series of monoprints, the skin is penetrated by an abstract snake-like entity or an amalgamation of invader cells. This work was made in 2003 at the height of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, when a disease that was eating away at the innards of the country went largely unseen and unspoken, shrouded in denialism, until it began to show up in welts and Kaposi’s sarcoma (one of the most common cancers in people living with HIV) on the bodies of those afflicted by it. Spanning the years just before and after the rollout of antiretrovirals (ARVs) in the public health system began in 2004 (following a tough political struggle), these works bespeak the plague years.

In the Skin and Ghosts (2006) series of monoprints, the skin is penetrated by an abstract snake-like entity or an amalgamation of invader cells. This work was made in 2003 at the height of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, when a disease that was eating away at the innards of the country went largely unseen and unspoken, shrouded in denialism, until it began to show up in welts and Kaposi’s sarcoma (one of the most common cancers in people living with HIV) on the bodies of those afflicted by it. Spanning the years just before and after the rollout of antiretrovirals (ARVs) in the public health system began in 2004 (following a tough political struggle), these works bespeak the plague years.

In the Skin and Ghosts (2006) series of monoprints, the skin is penetrated by an abstract snake-like entity or an amalgamation of invader cells. This work was made in 2003 at the height of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, when a disease that was eating away at the innards of the country went largely unseen and unspoken, shrouded in denialism, until it began to show up in welts and Kaposi’s sarcoma (one of the most common cancers in people living with HIV) on the bodies of those afflicted by it. Spanning the years just before and after the rollout of antiretrovirals (ARVs) in the public health system began in 2004 (following a tough political struggle), these works bespeak the plague years.

In Man Uncomfortable II (2006), several craters are visible in the otherwise smooth wooden surface of the carved figure. Spanning the years just before and after the rollout of antiretrovirals (ARVs) in the public health system began in 2004 (following a tough political struggle), these works bespeak the plague years.

In Man Uncomfortable V, the figure seems to be unfurling from a deathly sheath of his own flesh. Spanning the years just before and after the rollout of antiretrovirals (ARVs) in the public health system began in 2004 (following a tough political struggle), these works bespeak the plague years.

Van den Berg often depicts the body itself as a landscape and sees the body and the land as sites that carry memories and scars. Although the works in the SABC Collection are figurative engagements with the human form, they provide vital insight into Van den Berg’s understanding of our relationship to landscape as an embodied, physical experience—wounds and scars in the flesh are equivalent to wounds and scars in the land and can be read as a subjective continuum of psychosocial impacts and political memory.