Artist Kim Berman stands in front of her image entitled “Atonement”.
Kim Berman’s latest exhibition is a thing of beauty and technical mastery — though those who would prefer to bury our violent past might not appreciate her unflinching vision.
It tracks every South African desolation and tragedy for more than 40 years, from the death throes of apartheid to the present.
With its persistent thread of fire-blasted, smoking landscapes it is deeply and familiarly South African. But it also offers uplifting images of redemption and rebirth.
A central image of Remembering and Forgetting – Landscapes in Dialogue is a series on the second State of Emergency, proclaimed on 21 July 1985, when one policeman told township activists, “PW Botha het gesê ons kan julle soos vlieë doodmaak (PW Botha told us we can kill you like flies)”.
But it also touches on the agonies of transition — the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, rightwing vigilantes and murderous xenophobes, the collapse of gold mining and the subterranean tragedy of the zama zama. Even the carpet bombing of Gaza is referenced, with a South African inflection.
Berman’s tenth solo show, and first for 15 years, it holds out her intense brand of art engagé, with each jarring step on the journey seen from a humanist perspective.
Recently described as “a national treasure”, she is modest and approachable despite her high reputation. Now 65, she is on the point of retiring from the University of Johannesburg, where the retrospective has been staged*.
It is arranged and colour-coded by theme, and its opening section, “A State of Urgency”, instantly resurrects for any viewer who lived through the 1980s the peculiar horror of that decade.
On one wall hangs a series of sinister nocturnal studies, in pitch-black and white, of secret police abuses in the darkness-cloaked townships and rural wastes. A nameless man lies dead in the foreground, silhouetted by the headlights of distant vehicles — the suggestion is of security forces, though the drivers are unseen.
In another image captioned “What the hell does one do with this load of skeletons, shame and ash?”, a field of buried bones, with a half-seen skeleton and a skull, are intimated. In yet another, a terrified man is bundled into a police van, while a second victim averts his face from an impending blow.
On the opposite wall there is a countervailing series, which revolves around sunflowers.
Initially inspired as an image of mourning by the death of a close relative during the flowering season, the flowers recur in the exhibition as another leitmotiv.
Smouldering, wreathed in white smoke, “Sunflowers in Mourning”, “Fields of Grief” and “Rusted Ghosts” hint at stubborn resistance and survival.
It is a trope picked up in the show’s large climactic image, “Atonement”, of sunflowers standing in a bed of flames.
Berman worked at the Mixit Studios in the United States for five years as a master printmaker, and the current show deploys a broad array of elaborate printmaking techniques.
The state of emergency series consists of “aquatint-mezzotints”, where black is etched in multiple layers to form a dense dotted screen on a metal plate, with the image created using scrapers and burnishers to draw out and polish the lights from the dark ground.
In the sunflower series, the notion of remembrance is embodied in the retrieval and repurposing of rusted steel plates that lay in Berman’s garage for years.
Bits of plate, etched in acid and cleaned and rolled with ash-coloured ink before printing, summon up wraith-like flowers that return to haunt the present. To create a smouldering effect, ink applied to perspex is transferred to the print.
Other techniques are dry point or engraving with a sharp tool or electric dremel on cheap PVC plastic sheet, a less costly substitute for etching.
Berman herself has had two personal brushes with the terrible destructive power of fire. In the first, in 2003, her co-founder of Artist Proof Studio in Newtown, Nhlanhla Xaba, was burnt to death in a blaze that destroyed the studio premises. This year, a gas-fuelled inferno ravaged the studio at her Johannesburg home, destroying art works and long-held mementoes and personal effects, including a portrait of her grandfather, Richard.
As if to resurrect the gutted past, a corner of her exhibition is movingly devoted to an installation of burnt objects from the blaze — charred bundles of letters and postcards, half-consumed notebooks and the remains of a degree parchment, blackened picture frames, even, by a cruel irony, the scorched representation of a fire.
Fixed to the wall above, serving almost as the subject title of the installation, are electrifying images of two conflagrations. Isolated, living beings leaping in darkness, like the god Agni of the Rig Veda, they are lent special scarlet vividness by her printing techniques.
Berman is essentially a landscape artist, but human beings sometimes cross her eye in guises suggestive of human resilience and sympathy. In one touching tableau, rural women seen from behind, some holding hands for mutual comfort, look out steadily across desolate tracts.
In the section on mines and other damaged environments, the abandoned and scarred minescape of Stilfontein is peopled by tiny ant-swarms of illegal miners. “Digging for Death” shows, again from behind, figures excavating apartheid-era human remains.
And she is quite capable of creating powerful close-ups of human subjects. Highlighting this is her rogues’ gallery of apartheid monsters, from policymakers such as PW Botha and Adriaan Vlok to torturers and assassins such as Jeff Benzien and Wouter Basson.
The portrait of child-killer Craig Williamson is a masterly portrayal of concentrated evil. From a face of poisonous greenish-black, his enormous eyes bulge out whitely, like those of some misshapen product of Stygian gloom.
Berman is an artistic activist who has widely propagated printmaking as a democratic medium, accessible through the power to create “multiples”. The printmaking centre Artist Proof Studio, she says, has turned out 500 graduate printmakers in its 35 years.
In 1996 she was awarded a fellowship to study research papermaking in Ecuador, with an eye to setting up papermaking technology stations across the country.
Her exhibition serves as a corrective to the growing number of South Africans who either don’t care about our tortured past or actively call for us to “move on” and fix our eyes on the future.
We need to know where we came from. Whatever its failings, we live in a democratic state, and should know and acknowledge those who suffered to bring it into being.
Among them, notes a book at Berman’s show honouring “Unnamed Heroes”, is Deputy President Paul Mashatile, a victim of a house bombing.
Berman rejects the idea that her show is an essay in pessimism. “I see hope in every single image,” she told me in an interview. “In many of the images there is light on the horizon.
“Fire is a catalyst, typical of the Highveld. It destroys and recreates. Unless there is burning, there can be no renewal or growth.”
Remembering and Forgetting – Landscape in Dialogue closes at 4pm on Friday 12 September, but can be viewed in a virtual walk-through by arrangement with curator Dineke Orton ([email protected]) Stills from the show can be viewed on her website, kimberman.net
Drew Forrest is a former deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian.