Brenda Atkinson On show in Pretoria
Fernando Alvim speaks a language not readily associated with contemporary South African art. For one thing, it seems not to be artful. It is aware of theory, of art history, but bounces back to these only for cursory back-up of an emotional point. It is lyrical, expressionist, if you like, and could be criticised as such.
Indeed much of the art on memorias intimas marcas – the project Alvim has conceived and worked on officially for the last four years – is framed by poetic texts that sabotage the language of art criticism. In doing so, they attempt to undo the various languages that have managed our memory – and forgetting – of the Angolan war.
This might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but history tells us that death is one of the great conundrums of artistic representation. Put that with the fact that the experience of white South African conscripts is one of the most unspeakable topics in the new South Africa, and Alvim’s approach takes on a resonant legitimacy.
Now on its third South African leg, marcas is installed at a venue that strongly articulates the memories, intimacies and traces the project has set out to engage within the South African context. Pretoria’s military involvement in the administration of apartheid is a legacy not quite forgotten: the statues of apartheid’s architects loom large over Church Square, itself the nub of a semi-city still associated with political conservatism.
The marcas mission is to “install dialogue” through multimedia interventions. In a sense, the process of the project has become more the object and focus of the exercise than the individual exhibitions, which change as their context shifts. They function as localised reference-points and opportunities for education within a project that aims to identify the global within the local, and vice-versa.
The Pretoria exhibition, which follows a successful, if low profile, run at Johannesburg’s Electric Workshop, shifts the viewer’s position from that of intimate to observer. Where visitors to the Workshop were encouraged to walk into cubicles in which the works were installed, in Pretoria’s African Window Museum (formerly the old Mint) they are most often placed as visitors to what has become a model of a military hospital.
This particular part of the museum – used until now as a storage room – is cleverly occupied. The solution to spatial continuity is ingenious and formally very powerful: works by the eight artists, including Alvim, Colin Richards, Carlos Garaicoa, Gavin Younge, and now Thomas Barry, are installed in luminous white fabric “wards” which in most cases cannot be entered physically. The result is an eerie journey through a bleak aesthetic landscape that leaves one affected and drained.
The potential transformative power of this project arguably lies in the behind-the- scenes work that Alvim and his team have undertaken. Dialogue with local military structures and arts and culture ministers has led to unexpected alliances, and promises long-awaited openness around painful histories and future possibilities.
Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture Brigitte Mabandla has publicly backed the project, as have Themba Wakashe, Angolan President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, Desmond Tutu, UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, and key members of the European Union. And together with arts consultant and curator Clive Kellner, Alvim has initiated a publication, Marcas News, which will pose hard-hitting questions to cultural power- brokers, and hopefully receive honest answers.
In the course of its journey, marcas will undoubtedly prove to be a controversial project. But it is important and worthy of scrutiny, not only because it promises unprecedented communication and action around the taboo subjects of race, violence, and the failure of rainbowism, but because, as Alvim points out, our roots are not in the past, but in the future.
memorias intimas marcas is on show at the African Window Museum, Visagie Street, Pretoria until July 15