Antonio Ole deserves the prize for the best one- person “production” in Grahamstown. Less an installation than a poignant piece of theatre, his mixed-media opus, Breaking Boundaries, spans virtually the entire spectrum of colonial history, and simultaneously engages in the most pertinent discourses of contemporary art, without sacrificing the specifics of time, place or personal signature.
A film-maker and artist whose work was widely regarded as among the most resonant pieces on the 1995 Africus Biennale, Ole was invited by the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg — he will be exhibiting there after Grahamstown — to produce a work specifically for the festival. He has put together a visual treatise on slavery, war, and hope of renewal after destruction. And within the laager- like context of the cultural crypt known as the Gallery in the Round — rebuilt after a fire destroyed the Settlers’ Monument in 1994 — the exhibition assumes an ironic resonance.
Divided into southern and northern shrines, Ole’s exhibition is filled with the residue of a damaged, discarded past — objects found in Grahamstown as well as old documents and photographs excavated from the libraries of war-torn Luanda. Using salt as both physical and metaphoric material (the corrugated iron shrine is strewn with salt crystals, surrounded by an “offering” of sand, enamel plates and empty mugs), Ole presents a poignant narrative on colonialism and its consequences of dispossession, deprivation and decay.
More specific but no less emotive in its references, the northern shrine depicts the residue of Angola’s 30-year war. Shards of corrugated iron — the universal baggage of the dispossessed — hang like disembodied prosthetics. A fire-disfigured billiards scoreboard rescued from a colonial club, together with cheap replicas of Angolan fetish objects, are displayed like hunters’ trophies. And along the walls, the burnt and bombed shards of war are displayed in neat frames behind glass, like modernist paintings of Ndebele blankets exhibited in an ethnographic museum.
But the strength of Ole’s exhibition lies not only in its skilful allusions, in the visual impact of the salt crystals covering the gallery floor like diamond-studded sand, and the poignant image of a beautiful, anonymous slave reproduced along the southern shrine wall. It doesn’t simply lie in the accessible, albeit conceptually astute way in which Ole quotes from art history and everyday life, or the “realness” with which he communicates an experience whose legacy has yet to be erased. Rather, its resonance is located in the recognisable but ultimately ineffable realm of truly great art. And the response it evokes is like the sting of salt.