Battle 2006
Tapestry commissioned from the Keiskamma Art Project
1.2 x 0.8m
I am an artist working in Cape Town, South Africa. For my recent exhibition, 'Promised land', I commissioned a tapestry work, titled Battle , from the Keiskamma Art Project, an institution that works with rural, mainly Xhosa-speaking black women in the Eastern Cape to produce large-scale tapestry works. I asked the group to commemorate the successful resistance of residents of Thembelihle, near Soweto, Johannesburg, to their eviction by the City of Johannesburg in 2003.
I had first seen the Keiskamma Art Project's work on the Brett Kebble Art Awards in 2004, for which I was also a finalist. They exhibited their 60 metre long Keiskamma Tapestry (based on the Bayeux tapestry), which depicts the history of the Eastern Cape from precolonial times until the first democratic elections here in 1994. In a similar style to the Bayeux tapestry, little human and animal figures move chronologically through history, across the landscape of the tapestry, engaged in encounters and conflicts. Various battles are shown-the Battle of Rini, for example, between the British and the Xhosa, in which the rivers are depicted in red- they ran red that day from the blood of the fallen.
The tapestry focuses on historical struggle, in the time before the 'New South Africa' was brought into being. This defining of political struggle as part of history, part of the past, is especially complex and compromising in South Africa. At least half the country lives in poverty, more than a decade after 1994. There is increasing social and political unrest in South Africa, both within the Tripartite Alliance that binds the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions to the ruling African National Congress, and in poor communities, over the failure of adequate restitution to the majority of people who suffered under apartheid, and still suffer today.
As an artist concerned with the political, and with producing activist work, I thought of what was left out of the Keiskamma Tapestry, and how it could be reclaimed. The history of people's struggle in South Africa didn't end in 1994-I imagined a tapestry that commemorated contemporary struggle in this same 'grassroots' and 'historical' style. I was attracted not just to the form or appearance of the tapestry, but to these specific authors, the particular group who were to make it-I wanted to add to their narrative, and to become part of it.
Margaret Baguley's article for Craft Culture on the Australian Parliament House Embroidery raises the issue of 'authorship and recognition' in the relationship of artists to the craftspeople they commission (by coincidence, the Keiskamma Tapestry is now owned by and exhibited in our own Parliament in Cape Town). In my case, and apart from other concerns, correct attribution was important to the concept of the work; I was appropriating (or 'sampling') the Keiskamma Art Project themselves. When the tapestry was delivered to me, I noted that the women who had executed the work of the tapestry had written themselves into it; the names of the embroiderers and drawers were embroidered into the fabric. I appreciate the gesture-they are the authors of this work (as I am too), and it is appropriate that they are recorded on it.
Battle tapestry detail
There are other appropriated or sampled works on 'Promised land'. I use found-objects, some manipulated to open them to broader readings, as documents of contemporary South Africa. Battle is what I've termed a 'fictional artefact'-something with the appearance of a found-object or document (it's clear I didn't make it), but which I've actually had fabricated as an art-work. The other works that I really have found or bought help to camouflage the fictional artefacts-though I am explicit in my documentation about the source of the work. I'm asking the viewer to imagine with me, while revealing the real origins of the work.
I started with the broad idea of showing contemporary political struggle, but wanted a particular and emblematic incident, like a 'battle', which I could specifically depict. I have contacts amongst the activists working in what are called 'social movements' in South Africa. These include the Anti-Privatization Forum and the Landless People's Movement, both of which have roots in the anti-Apartheid struggle, but which now work to advance the causes of people denied basic services like water and electricity, and land. They informed me about the community of Thembelihle (literally 'place of hope'), which was threatened with relocation to a more distant area under the pretence that the land they were on was unsafe for habitation. A leaked letter between the local municipal council and a developer revealed that the area was intended for development for higher-income residents once they had been removed. The story of Thembelihle is more extensively covered in the article 'The Real Story Behind the Forced Removals in Thembelihle' by Dale McKinley, referenced at the end of this article.
The residents organized themselves and successfully resisted relocation by the notorious 'Red Ants', a private security company employed by the City for unpopular eviction work. The 'Red Ants', so-called because of their red overalls and helmets, are themselves poor people, paid a pittance for their work. Their already iconic status and appearance made for a good depiction on the tapestry; you can seem them streaming down the centre of the panel in the photo above.
Battle is an example of what Kevin Murray describes elsewhere in this magazine (in 'The wheel turns: New opportunities for post-colonial artists through the South Project South African Perspective') as 'a meeting of traditional skill and modernist technique'-the modernist technique here being the 'found-object', which the tapestry pretends to be. But perhaps there is more of the post-modern in Battle, in particular its combining of sincerity and falseness, its simultaneous undermining and elevating of authenticity. I am sincere in my desire to give visibility to contemporary struggle, and the material, the content for the tapestry is real, as is the craft and idiom of the embroiderers. At the same time the 'memorial' is a contrivance-I am a white urban artist commissioning black rural women to commemorate (largely) black urban resistance. This is a complex fabric.
The Keiskamma Art Project are appropriators and 'remixers' themselves, producing works that depict local histories, but are based on the form of iconic Western art-works. Their work with embroidery and textiles is also derived from a confluence of cultures. Needlework was taught to black children in early mission schools, and a tradition of imported cotton cloth worn as skirts, shawls and headscarves, and adorned with beads and buttons, had emerged amongst the Xhosa by the mid-eighteenth century.
As the Keiskamma Tapestry's source is in the Bayeux Tapestry, the Keiskamma Altarpiece is based on the Issenheim altarpiece by the German painter Mathias Grunewald, and depicts the effects of the AIDS pandemic in South Africa. In the Keiskamma work, the saints of Grunewald's imagery are translated into members of the local community, and the entombment of Christ is translated as the funeral of a son of an elder of their community, taken by AIDS in 2002.
The Keiskamma Art Project root their expression in local soil, and work to uplift their community both spiritually and materially. I wish to thank them for extending this same professionalism and generosity to my work, and I'd like to think of our work on Battle as adding a very small tributary to the mainstream of their practice. My thanks go too to the community of Thembelihle, and the activists working there.
Notes
'Promised land' by Ralph Borland - http://ralphborland.net/promisedland
The Keiskamma Art Project - http://www.keiskamma.org
'The Real Story Behind the Forced Removals in Thembelihle' by Dale McKinley -http://www.red.m2014.net/article.php3?id_article=89
