An incomplete homage to Pretoria

Pretoria is SA’s seat of power where on June 19, in a show of the country’s military might, helicopters and fighter jets could be heard overhead as proceedings of the presidential inauguration took place. A recent exhibition at the Bridge Gallery is an ode to the city where the gallery is located.

Homage to Pretoria comprises drawings, paintings and sculptures gleaned primarily from the University of Pretoria Museums institutional art collection. The exhibition features artworks by historically iconic artists such as Jacob Hendrik Pierneef, Diane Victor and Gerard Sekoto alongside contemporary artists such as Lefifi Tladi, Peter Sibeko and Paul Ramagaga among others. 

There is a deep seated power struggle in this exhibition which takes a place at the expense of what this show might have sought to achieve. Hegemonic ideas of what informs and constitutes fine art clash with the contention that the arts establishment has placed white arts practitioners at the centre of fine art and relegated the work of black practitioners to only existing to fulfil the fetishes of how white people choose to see the world. Opposing ideas battle in the exhibition space.

The Bridge Gallery is located in the Javett Art Centre building where the National Treasures: Mapungubwe Gold Collection is also housed. The gold artefacts of that exhibit hold immense historical and cultural significance for SA. The famed gold rhino sculpture, unearthed in Mapungubwe, illustrated the existence of pre colonial black civilisation in Southern Africa. The Bridge Gallery sits alongside the collection of artefacts but nothing of this and what it represents seems to have influenced Homage to Pretoria. 

The gallery is separated into an entryway and main exhibition hall by a glass, sensor-operated sliding door which, though translucent, allows for a tone or scene setting before entering the featured exhibition. In the entryway, co-curators Gerard de Kamper and Uthando Baduza lean heavily on the architectural drawings and paintings of the Union Buildings. These artworks depict the various stages of the building’s construction, two Pierneefs, both titled Moving Bricks, Union Buildings show the construction process, and two Johannes Borman watercolours, each titled Union Buildings Side View, show the completed building from various idyllic angles- one complete with bright orange blooming flowers, and the other around the place where Ms Zanele Mbeki refused to hand her bag over to an aide before the presidential inauguration.

The Union Buildings were built with two wings to symbolise the union of SA by the British and Afrikaner in 1910, with no consideration for the black people who were the original occupants of the region before it was colonised. In the exhibition, however, a miniature version of the Nelson Mandela statue designed by Andre Prinsloo and Ruhan Janse van Vuuren, which stands at the Union Buildings today, perches with arms outstretched towards the main exhibition space. This is not an unwelcome inclusion of black South Africans’ role in the history of public art as well as one black person’s power and agency. However, the side-by-side placement of the former group of artworks representing white peoples’ overcoming and achievement alongside the Madiba statue shows the stark omission of historical, thematic and art theoretical complexity of Pretoria.

Intended or inadvertent, this omission is the fissure line along which the curators of the exhibition have created a trench war between what the various works depict and represent in the context of the city. The gallery’s main exhibition space presents some complexity to the clash of ideas, with works that restrict black life during and after apartheid to rurality, the townships and the church; and those that highlight white (and colonial) creative and progressive contributions to Pretoria, and its greater significance. 

Another similar omission presents black life as chaotic. In Johan van Reenen’s The other side, a black-and-white lithograph on paper that shows a double storey house with a paved courtyard and water feature in front of it on one half of the canvas; and a knife-wielding black man in the foreground of a far less constructed residence behind him on the other half. This work exists in conversation with Peter Sibeko’s mixed media painting Three Women, which depicts black women in a rural setting; Franzile Masombuka’s acrylic on board painting Cross roads depicting a brightly coloured informal settlement, and Judas Mahlangu’s etching on paper work, Baptism, showing a black congregation celebrating the religious rite of passage. 

Pretoria, or Pitori with the townships and other communities at the city’s outskirts, is a place with political, racial, social, cultural fissures and fault lines. The visual arts have, over time, responded to and in some instances instigated the splits, collisions and abrasions that make Pitori what it is. By omitting the complexity of the experience of a large swathe of the city’s population, the Homage to Pretoria remains incomplete. 

• Homage to Pretoria is open to the public until December 16.