Irish mixed-media artist Phillip Napier’s 10-year-old work Gauge, which has been on display at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg since December 16 last year, draws parallels with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and provides a rare opportunity for South Africans to explore the theme of reÂÂconciliation through the medium of fine art. But it is an uneasy tenant at this landmark museum.
Gauge, which was first installed at the Orchard Gallery in Derry, Northern Ireland, is inspired by Bloody Sunday, which took place in that city on January 30 1972. On this day, 14 unarmed civilians taking part in a civil rights protest were murdered by British soldiers. In a report on the incident three months later, the then lord chief justice of England, Lord Widgery, stated that it was strongly suspected that the civilians had been armed with bombs and guns and had threatened the police, a claim the Irish have protested against for the past 35 years.
The Saville Inquiry, established in 1998 by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is expected to rule on the findings later this year. Meanwhile, the inquiry has been shrouded in controversy, becoming something of a political football, further desecrating the memory of the dead.
On show at the Apartheid Museum’s Round Room until March 30, Gauge comprises a PA system with 14 speakers suspended from Salter scales, which hang from horizontal overhead cables. From the speakers, which represent the 14 casualties, a looped apology is echoed. ”I’m sorry … I really am sorry … I apologise …,” drone the voices. Each apology stirs the scales into action ever so slightly, forcing us to ponder how much weight an apology actually carries. ”How necessary is an apology in allowing one to continue the individual journey in the process [of healing]?” asks Napier in a video accompanying the installation. ”Isn’t asking for an apology rhetorical, don’t you know the answer before you ask?”
In its history, the work has been displayed in various venues, taking a different slant in each. After its initial showing at the Orchard Gallery in Derry in 1997, it was exhibited as part of a work called Locations, Dislocations, Relocations inside a derelict building in Glenfada Park overlooking a square where some of the Bloody Sunday shootings took place. Placed squarely in its milieu, this was its most evocative incarnation. The building, dank and dark with mildew-stained walls, evoked images of a brutal prison, thereby sufficiently fulfilling the artist’s need to link the work to the place and the conditions that inspired it, in ways both metaphorical and direct. The actual concept for Gauge began when Napier, while walking the streets of a working class area in Belfast where he works and lives (about two hours from Derry), was extremely saddened to witness a woman in a bridal dress emerging from a prison. He remembers being ”sorry about this” and immediately thinking about the Derry shootings.
There are obvious parallels with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where an apology was one of the prerequisites for receiving amnesty for participation in apartheid-era politically motivated crimes. While its link to the Apartheid Museum is obvious, its resonance in this instance is hampered by an ill-advised attempt to recreate Glenfada Park. So much about Gauge is staged that it ends up being an intellectual, aesthetic exercise rather than a moving emotional experience. Dampness, for example, which was aimed at recapturing the feeling of dereliction — an idea central to the artist’s epiphany — has been established by fitting in a pipe that dribbles water from an external source.
While the sound of dribbling water has a metaphorical resonance of its own, somewhat linked to the idea of remembrance, the stuck-on, two-piece laminated photograph depicting dampness commodifies the already gentrifying Glenfada Park.
In this case then, it is probably useless to draw the direct link to Derry and best to muse on the merits of an apology in the larger context of the global post-colonial condition.
While Gauge provides a fresh perspective on apartheid, visitors to the museum, especially South Africans, have reacted with trepidation and befuddlement. According to one museum guide, when they find out that it symbolises a tragedy that took place in Northern Ireland, many visitors then wonder why they are being asked to engage with it.
With its packaging of apartheid for tourists, the Apartheid Museum almost guarantees that South Africans will forget that we were not alone. Northern Ireland is, after all, still colonised by the British, and no number of apologies can change that.