Anke Schäfer at the Bag Factory studios
by Michael Smith
The persistence with which issues of safety and security play on the collective psyche in South Africa means that the they can no longer, it seems, be explained away as unreasonable paranoia. Despite irresponsible and evasive attempts by politicians to ascribe fear of crime to residual post-apartheid racism, the complexity of these issues is better served by more thorough investigation. Yet, in the wake of a year of murders and attacks of high profile South Africans, art's responses to crime seem bound to conduct a difficult balancing act between elucidating something worthwhile and capitalising on the currency of the issue. It certainly seems that German artist Anke Schäfer, who visited SA until early April 2007 as part of a residency programme run through the Bag Factory Studios, has revealed a sensitivity that places her in the former category. While here Schäfer created a varied and nuanced body of work, shown on 'Being Here', an exhibition that mostly avoided the pitfalls of perpetuating stereotypes associated with this emotive subject.
The show featured three video projections and a number of photographs. Also available was a foldout print with quotations by various South Africans one assumes Schäfer had met while resident in Johannesburg. These statements deal with perceptions of crime and the threat of violence, and emotions around racism, mistrust and xenophobia. Interestingly, these were attributed to people whose names were manually blocked out with felt-tip marker, playfully riffing on SA's history of draconian censorship. Whether this multiple was intended to be an artwork I am not sure, but it certainly functioned as an interesting index of the complex proliferation of positions and opinions into which issues of safety and security in contemporary SA tap.
Schäfer employed her suitably varied set of formal strategies and processes to deal with the ways in which crime, violence and mistrust remain the subtexts in many interactions between South Africans. The work that dealt most directly with this was Rehearsal Last Supper, a projection that felt in places like a documentation of a performance, but which ultimately proved powerful as an independent artwork. Consisting of a series of staged quasi-comedic interactions between pairs of actors, the work operated somewhere between Three Stooges-style slapstick and the trash-talk of racist and sexist denigration. The physical comedy of the initial meeting between each pair (chairs being yanked out from under each other, characters falling over-dramatically onto the ground, etc.) soon gave way to enactments of serious violence.
Before long, things had escalated to the point where the actors took turns stabbing one another, punctuating their lunges with particularly South African insults like 'kwerekwere' and 'poes'. Though the work initially felt conceptually reductive of its chosen area of violent xenophobia, the constant barrage of similar scenes all ending in mortal clashes seemed eventually to comment quite astutely on the inevitability of danger and loss in so many South African lives. Schäfer's awareness of the ubiquity of fear and its attendant hatred seem to have been key in the making of this work, and as it looped it seemed to want to explore the apparent endlessness of the cycle in which post-apartheid society finds itself.
Interestingly, she speaks of the work as dealing with the core issue of communication, and the lack thereof being at the root of many of Johannesburg's problems. Not downplaying the effects of violence, Schäfer states that 'in my personal experience, to communicate with each other, to speak to each other at the same eye level, and to overcome [one's] own limited views on each other is the main problem� fear might be human, but blockades our communication.'
Of particular interest was the video work The Curtain 2007. A 22 minute single shot meditation on an anonymous curtain, I found the work highly nuanced and powerful, the antithesis of Rehearsal Last Supper's deliberate hysteria. Its formal similarity to colourfield painting is undeniable, a soft expanse of subtle hues reminiscent of works by Rothko or even contemporary Swiss painter Markus Doëbeli. Yet occasionally the filmed curtain shifts almost imperceptibly in a light breeze, revealing a set of burglar bars behind it. While the visual change is subtle, the shift in tone is huge. Suddenly the reverie is ruptured, and the work moves to explore underlying paranoia and the difficulty of total relaxation in such a fraught context. As if to heighten this sense of disruption, a photographic still of the same subject, presumably culled from the video, bares a large central rift, the result of a momentary overlap of sections of the curtain's fabric. Otherworldly in a manner that recalls Man Ray's photograms, this physical agitation of the surface speaks eloquently of a society ill at ease with itself, and prone to polarisation.
Schäfer's presence and work in South Africa proves the value of exchange programmes like that which operates through the Bag Factory Studios. It would just be great if the Bag Factory could host longer shows of resident's work in the future, given the importance of such initiatives for the continued health of the SA art scene.
Opens: March 28
Closes: May 5
Bag Factory Studios
10 Mahlatini Street, Fordsburg, Johannesburg
Email: info@bagfactoryart.org.za
Hours: Mon - Sat 9am - 4pm
