The Politics of Memory in South African Art

ABSTRACT There is a saying attributed to Winston Churchill that goes, “History is written by the victors,” indicating that all histories are subjective and biased in some way. This was certainly true for South Africa under the Nationalist regime where the exploits of Afrikaner colonialism were glorified, and the majority of the population were mere “bit players” at best and vilified as savages at worst. Such traumatic histories have been interrogated by Penny Siopis in her “History Paintings” made in the early post-apartheid era which consider the residual effects of a dominant patriarchal and colonial discourse on the lives of black women in South Africa. Like Siopis, Paul Emmanuel and Diane Victor engage with the biased nature of history and memory in the light of post-apartheid dispensation in South Africa and the continuing after effects of our fraught past. This article considers the way these three artists engage with the inherent fragility and bias of memory through the materials they employ as much as the content of their works. I consider selected works by these artists and investigate how they engage with the politics of memory to expose fabrications and redress lacunae in the continuum of contested South African histories. I suggest that their works demonstrate how memories have been manipulated in service to a dominant ideology; in other words, they expose the “politics” of memory by using reconstituted/reworked memories to revisit and restore histories that might otherwise be lost.