Alex Dodd
Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Lindiwe Sisulu has been accused of old-order politics by South Africa’s chief censor after she threatened to ban an art exhibition of child nudes at the Grahamstown arts festival.
The row between the two was sparked by artist Mark Hipper’s exhibition Viscera, on show at the Rhodes University School of Fine Art. The works are a series of charcoal portraits of a baby’s face and line studies of nude children.
What has caused the ”concern” from Sisulu and child welfare groups is an oil painting of a young boy touching his genitalia.
In an SAfm radio interview on Thursday, Sisulu suggested the exhibition be banned – a comment which had Film and Publications Board CEO Dr Nana Makaula hopping mad.
”This is exactly what happened in the past,” said Makaula. ”It is bad publicity for the board. We are going back to where we were before, where the minister told the board what to do.”
Sisulu told SAfm: ”I am saying to you now, and I will say it tomorrow, we do not allow child pornography in whatever form.”
Makaula said Sisulu does not have the authority to influence the board to that extent: ”The board was made a statutory body to ensure its independence and to ensure that there would be no political interference.
”I have been given room to make independent decisions. I work with highly qualified professionals. The board is constituted of people with senior degrees. We are intelligent people, and it is an embarrassment to us and her that she has made this public statement.
”She has all the right to advise us. We respect her right to do so, but we cannot take instructions from her. It is wrong for her to make public statements on what the board should do. It is totally unacceptable.
”We are meeting on Friday and we are taking the unusual step of calling a full board meeting to look into this and I don’t want to say the board won’t ban it.”
Sisulu’s representative, Burton Joseph, said she ”respected, recognised and upheld” the independence of the board and had not attempted to interfere with its work. ”But Mr Hipper’s paintings definitely violated the 1996 film and publications Act.
”Schedule 11 of the Act defines sexual conduct as genitals in a state of arousal, the lewd display of genitals, masturbation, sexual intercourse, the fondling or touching with any object of genitals.” Joseph was unable to say whether Sisulu had viewed the exhibition.
The controversy was sparked by an article in The Weekend Post headlined ”Festival kid porn outrage”. At that stage not a single complaint had been made about the exhibition – which opened on June 28 – to the artist or Rhodes University, where Hipper is a fine arts lecturer.
In response to the article, Child Welfare and Women against Child Abuse lodged official complaints. This led to the police visiting the exhibition, and the Film and Publications Board flying in to view it.
Makaula said the board’s procedure is to wait for complaints from the public, then to constitute a committee of examiners to investigate the complaint. By Thursday morning, the board had not yet received a single written complaint.
”In this case it was clear there was very divided opinion, the public was split over whether it was offensive or not. So we made a decision not to close the exhibition for review, but to go down and look at it ourselves.”
Makaula and her chief examiner, Clayton Wakeford, flew to Grahamstown to look at the exhibition. ”My first impression was that it was a bona fide piece of art. Our problem was that the Act makes exceptions about children and sexuality,” she said.
Makaula said the board has been examining Schedule 11 of the Act, which defines what is sexual conduct. When the board was first constituted on April 15, members had criticised the schedule and announced their intention to review it.
”These events have overtaken us. When we took office we were supposed to take the Act and revise it, and we have been working evenings and Saturdays to first of all put forward classifications of things that were banned in the past, especially erotic material,” she said.
Rhodes University vice-chancellor David Woods said it was clear Sisulu was attempting to censor Hipper. ”The information we have is that it is not pornographic and it should not be censored.”