South Africa's National Arts Festival (review)

The program for the ambitious 2012 South African National Arts Festival (NAF) was notable for its fixation on origin stories and unsettled histories. Performances interrogated received narratives, both in terms of African primitivism as the "Cradle of Humankind" and the legacies of colonialism that continue to determine the definition of humanity in the postcolonial, post-apartheid era. The first festival premiered in 1974 amid a climate of intense repression and state violence. Since cutting its teeth on the protest theatre that defined the (anti-)apartheid era, the NAF has conceived of itself as an oppositional space. As it reaches its thirty-eighth year, however, the festival, much like the nation itself, seems to be experiencing an identity crisis. Productions this year questioned the complicity of visual art and performance in perpetuating colonial power relations, asking just who has the right to speak for whom, and how.

This year's festival followed on the heels of a national scandal surrounding a painting by white artist Brett Murray that featured president Jacob Zuma's genitalia (The Spear) and opened up unprecedented public discussion about the role of art in society. The May 2012 pageant surrounding The Spear had many acts: a dramatic court case where an advocate burst into tears defending the president's penis; a surprise twist when two unconnected men—one white and one black—simultaneously defaced the painting; and a spectacular climax with thousands marching to the gallery to demand the painting's removal and destruction.

The specter of The Spear and its co-performances haunted the festival. This year marked Grahams-town's 200th anniversary as a settler town: a bastion of colonial rule that displaced local communities, paved the way for apartheid, and underscored the continuing socioeconomic inequities. Two iconoclastic white South African artists, Brett Bailey and Steven Cohen, each known for their provocative interventions, separately engaged the politics of display and art's ability to tap into the psychic wounds of colonialism. Drawing attention to the painful meanings attached to the display of black South African bodies, these artists both critiqued and perpetuated an unquestioning embrace of the "black-body-as-signifier" by white artists.

Exhibit A by Bailey and his company Third World Bunfight restaged invisible histories in the guise of a museum exhibition. The installation encouraged audiences to walk one by one through a series of rooms that displayed colonial "artifacts." These artifacts—Bibles, pigment charts, maps, hunting trophies—included human performers who, in their stillness, initially seemed to be just another static set piece in the colonial diorama. So familiar were these figures that it could take several seconds—eyes tracing a thigh here, a breast there—to realize that these were not plastic statues, but live people staring back. Each subsequent room demonstrated increasingly violent aspects of the colonial project, the set pieces less nostalgic and more brutal and the eye contact more accusative. One room featured disembodied heads displayed on plinths, each singing haunting hymns in Chichewa and illuminated by scientific lamps. Another room had a woman squatting frozen on a platform holding a skull and a piece of glass, surrounded by shards and barbed wire, skinning the skulls of her neighbors to send back to European scientists as proof of Africans' supposed savage nature. The final rooms featured contemporary figures, helpfully labeled as "Congolese Immigrant" and "Colored Woman, Grahamstown," performed by local community members that Bailey had invited to portray themselves in the piece. These present bodies, present in time and space, made explicit the continued displacement and abuse of black bodies transnationally.

Colonial "artifacts"—pigment chart, Bibles, and souvenirs (front); taxidermied heron and legs of "pygmies" (back)—in Exhibit A. (Photo: Lauren Rawlins.)

Often discussed throughout the festival, Exhibit A regularly brought its audiences to tears. Others reported feeling ill. From the moment viewers recognized the liveness of the "exhibits" they had paid to view, they were implicated in the history that had given them the power to gaze. The exchange of eye contact...