Omar Farah
Jan. 16, 2024
Reconsidering Johannesburg's 1997 Biennale: Post-Nationalist Politics in a Post-Apartheid Era
The second and final Johannesburg Biennale, curated by Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor in 1997, continues to cast a shadow over exhibition making on the continent of Africa — held up as a cautionary tale of the pronounced disconnects between the politics of transnational art world elites and local African audiences. To a profound extent, this historiography ossified before the biennale had even ended, with a slew of early reviews constructing the narrative of an "antagonist local public" that rejected the globalist and hybrid lens of Enwezor's exhibition. In an interview with New Art Examiner, art historian Carol Becker said that the "biennale was ahead of where South Africa is, and is ready to be, at this moment, especially in terms of its discourse." Placing more critical emphasis on the curation than Becker, but still presenting an insurmountable chasm, Malian filmmaker Manthia Diawara argued that the show was "alienating to South Africans both on the grounds of content (the preoccupation with hybridity) and form (abstract video installations and neo-conceptualism)."
It is true that the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale did not attempt to fix itself to the national politics of its host country, or for that matter even the African continent. The exhibition, which was entitled Trade Routes: History and Geography, intentionally set its subject as the "resilient cultural fusions and disjunctions " that constituted the globalized present. In that vein, Enwezor made the decision to forego the traditional biennale organization of national pavilions. Instead, the exhibition was a sprawling, unbordered survey of trade and migration from over 150 artists — only 35 of whom were South African. Some of the most important work spotlighted by this exhibition actually came from artists outside of South Africa like Chinese artist Gu Wenda whose human hair sculpture United Nations — Africa Monument: Oasis which took up the difficulty of exchange across language or Mexican artist Teresa Serrano who took up issues of migration and human flow with her video work The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence. To critics, the transnational politics of these works was categorized as "alienating" to the South African public. But in reality, South Africans always (and especially in this moment) consciously embodied the uncomfortability of an entangled and globalized society. South Africa was charting an unprecedented course for a post-colonial African nation, hinging its identity on multicultural and multiracial harmony. Unlike a politics of retribution against white settler, as took place in Zimbabwe, or one of African cultural authenticity as took place under Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire — the nationalism of South Africa's African National Congress (ANC) did not aim to erase the stain of colonial rule nor return to an "untouched" South Africa but worked to imagine what it would look like to live better within this histories wake, with all of its curious complexity and entanglement.
But this political project was a fragile one at the time of the biennale. By 1997, the political future of Nelson Mandela, the inimitable symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle, flickered with uncertainty, raising questions about the longevity of the ANC's leadership over the young multiracial democracy. At the same time, the stakes of Black African leadership were front and center each and every week with televised recaps of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, reiterating and sometimes unearthing new contours of the horrors faced by Black and Brown South Africans under apartheid. If there was ever a time for the experiment of post-apartheid democracy to fail, it was this moment. With all that at stake, ANC policy sometimes leaned into the mechanistic power of the nation state and away from the grammars of hybridity putting it — in critical moments — at odds with the critiques and worldviews of Enwezor's exhibition.
This study of the biennale's reception takes seriously how the political context of 1997 bled into the reception of the exhibition — digging past simple narratives of a public unequipped to handle its complexity. Through a praxis of reading the politics of South Africa just as closely as the art in the biennale's exhibition halls, a more complicated history of this exhibition and its disconnects emerges. Looking at three performances from the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, alongside a rigorous history of post-apartheid politics, this study models a mode of exhibition history that will be vital to the future of African art. This praxis of historical research, as is often the case in the Black radical tradition, is a tool of historiography and futurity, better illuminating a path forward for curation on the African continent.
Chapter One | Borders
As the biennale opened to audiences on the night of October 10, 1997, its preoccupation with the flow of information, resources, and people was impossible to ignore. Entrance to the main exhibition space — an abandoned power station in central Johannesburg known colloquially as "the Electric Workshop"— was not as simple as presenting a ticket. Instead, entrance to the biennale was mediated by a performance piece. Standing behind a pile of blue passbooks and wearing a uniform of the same bureaucratic color, Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco discerningly controlled entry into the space — issuing each visitor a passbook. Importantly, this performance operates on two levels of state critique. In site-specific terms, the passbook takes on new meaning with the history of the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 that sanctioned the use of internal passports to enforce strict racial segregation in apartheid South Africa.
Coco Fusco, Rights of Passage, performance, The Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg, South Africa (1997)
That very same day of October 10th, blocks away from the Electric Workshop, a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission convened to hear testimony about the abuses of state police and military under the apartheid rule of the National Party. In these proceedings, Commissioner of the South African Police from 1990-1995 Johan Velde van der Merwe, contradicted the words of South Africa's last apartheid-era President F.W. de Klerk who claimed "the National Party government had never authorized human rights crimes." The radical reconciliation process at play in South Africa and particularly in Johannesburg as the biennale opened was producing confessions unimaginable to the South African public. With a weekly program called Truth Commission: Special Report holding viewership of over a million South Africans each week, these admissions were penetrating public consciousness. So as Fusco served up passbooks during the biennale's big night, South Africans were absorbing the horror of the details and conscious evil at play in apartheid era policing. With the political surround, Fusco's work offered a timely critique of state control.
The difficult thing about state critique in a work like Fusco's is that it does not narrowly apply to the white supremacist rule of South Africa's National Party during the apartheid era. Indeed, the performance was offered by the artist in countless sites beyond Johannesburg which suggests a reading that more generally pushes back on structures of power that control the flow of resources, information, and people across borders. By 1997, it was the ANC who held the reins of state power and who managed the country's borders. Although passbooks had been done away with, and internal borders that controlled the flow of people based on race had collapsed, the South African public and ANC government of 1997 were strongly out of step with the politics of Fusco's performance.
In the year of Enwezor's biennale, a stunning poll of South African sentiments on immigration found that the young multiracial democracy was ardently protective of its borders and profoundly suspicious of immigrants, especially those from other African nations. In this study by the South African Migration Project (SAMP), at the time of the Johannesburg Biennale, a quarter of the population favored a complete ban on immigration, with 45% calling for strict limits. At that time, only 6% identified as open to immigration.
This public sentiment was mirrored in the post-apartheid immigration policy of South Africa which departed only cosmetically from the xenophobic policy framework of the apartheid era. In their final act in power, as the future of white rule in South Africa crumbled, the National Party passed the 1991 Aliens Control Act (ACA). This piece of legislation placed strict limits on immigration from other African nations, a constituency often fleeing the brutal war in South Africa's neighboring countries or lured in by the country's brutal mining industry that constantly needed new labor. The ACA also deployed massive resources to the enforcement of this immigration policy, granting the state unprecedented power to imprison and deport undocumented immigrants. Despite massive rewriting of apartheid laws and the introduction of a new constitution, the ANC amended the apartheid immigration laws to eradicate their preference for white immigrants, but leaving them otherwise intact.
This socio-political backdrop to the 1997 biennale helps elucidate the tension between Enwezor's exhibition and the South African public. From this history of the ANC's late 1990s immigration policy and a survey of public opinion surrounding it, the post-nationalist thrust of the 1997 Johannesburg biennale does not emerge as the post-apartheid consensus. Instead, the critique at the center of Fusco's performance directly threatens the strict anti-immigration policy and sentiment of 1997 South Africa.
Chapter Two | Hybridity
Across the country, on South Africa's southwest coast, another piece of performance art further intensified the spark of friction between the politics of the biennale and the sociopolitical realities of the day. In Cape Town, home to the South African legislature and a high density of the country's mixed (referred to in South Africa as Coloured) population, one of the biennale's exhibitions entitled Graft exclusively surveyed a group of established and emerging South African artists to consider the multiplicity and hybridity of the post-apartheid subject. In the grandeur of Cape Town's National Gallery, a 23 year old Tracey Rose presented her piece Span II. In this performance, Rose sat atop a television as if it were a comfortable seat. Nude, bald, legs crossed — Rose concentrated on braiding the freshly shaven hair in front of her into a tightly wound string. Collecting clumps of her coiled hair that buoyantly floated off the floor, the South African artist methodically fashioned hair into fabric as the television beneath her played a film that tightly panned over her nude body. All of this was mediated by a glass case that muddied this agential performance with an uncomfortable anthropological casing.
Tracey Rose, Span II, performance, The Johannesburg Biennale, Cape Town, South Africa (1997)
The piece, as is often the case with Tracey Rose, operates as a historiography of Coloured life under apartheid. Hair, in the context of apartheid era racial classification, is a potent symbol of the politicized nature of the South African body — and how that enforcement breaks down against the more marked hybridity of Coloured South Africans. To enforce the Population Registration Act of 1950, which officially determined and recorded the race of every South African citizen, the apartheid government honed in on hair to make their absurd racial classifications. One of the most notorious tests that Coloured South Africans at the border of "established racial phenotypes" were routinely subjected to was called the pencil test — the placement of a pencil through one's hair to determine one's racial classification. If the pencil crashed to the floor, one was classified as white. If it stuck, suspending amid the tension of tight curls, one was classified as black. Many Coloured people in South Africa, under tests like this, were sorted into the pieces of their lineage — classified as White or Black. And sometimes, hair exposed the hybrid resistance of Coloured bodies as the pencil slid and stopped and then slid once more through their ambiguous hair textures. The Coloured body, in its bothness, destabilized the strict racial philosophy and categories of apartheid South Africa. Refusing this classification-obsessed gaze, Rose shaves her head, but instead of discarding its historical weight, its complexity, she fashions it into a lineage.
Rose's approach of salvage, bathing in the interstitial space of Coloured identity, was surprisingly not the approach of the emerging rainbow nation. In the ANC's post-apartheid rhetoric, there was a distinct choice to present a unified nation — where Black and White South Africans lived in harmony. This was Nelson Mandela's rhetoric from the very beginning of this presidency, and his 1994 inaugural speech, Mandela projected this vision, saying, "We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world." The rainbow nation, as it were, would not build out more complexity from the brute apartheid era categories of Black, White, and Coloured. Rather, it would condense the experiences of South Africans even further into the strict and binary categories of Black and White. According to sociologist Whitney Pirtle, this erasure of the Coloured category would continue in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings that largely collapsed distinctions between Black and Coloured experiences under apartheid. The rainbow nation, in its thrust toward non-racialism, worked to dissolve the category of Coloured rather than indulge in a discourse that excavated its complexities.
Works like Tracey Rose's Span II and others like Berni Searle's Com-fort that meditate on the hybridity of the Coloured body, deviated slightly but importantly from the political discourse of the time. In their artistic investigations of the hybrid body which destabilizes racial categories, work like Searle and Rose's aligned well with the anti-racist but not the post-racial politics of the ANC government. Despite these works critique of racial category, they produce an archive of Coloured existence that projects dreams of liberation beyond race while carrying formal elements like Rose's cage that hint at the longevity of the racial gaze.
In this way, the hybridity focused works in the Johannesburg Biennale— particularly the most potent pieces from Coloured South African artists like Bernie Searle and Tracey Rose — operate on a more realist register than the ANC rhetoric of 1997. Where the ANC projected a future of non-racialism, Coloured South African artists instead met this moment with work that created an archive of the mixed body under scrutiny, inscribing their experiences into the country's cultural history and leaning into the complexities and tensions of mixed existences. Once again, the political project of a multiracial nation state conflicted with the register, form, and politics of the art in the 1997 Biennale.
Chapter III | Rugby Rainbow Nationalism
Outside Hänel Gallery in Cape Town, a simple and motionless performance by Afrikaans artist Peet Pienaar took aim at one of the most powerful symbols in post-apartheid cultural integration — the country's World Champion rugby team the Springboks or simply the Boks. The work itself is animated more by brute embodiment than conceptual complexity — with Pienaar himself describing the activating agent in his practice as "the baggage of the real person." In this piece, Pienaar stands erect, emotionless, but conscious of a public gaze as his feet position him in a pose fit for a red carpet. His glimmering green suit pulls in his stocky body and draws attention away from the tension in his clenched left palm. There is a dormant violence in Pienaar's gesture and gaze that seem to be kept at bay with the glossy fanfare of competitive sports. The silver rugby in hand, a bright orange cake at his feet, all seem decoration to transform something menacing to something heroic.
Peet Pienaar, Untitled, performance, The Johannesburg Biennale, Cape Town, South Africa (1997)
But Peet Pienaar's performance achieves much more for the way it evokes the history of a different Pienaar years earlier. In 1995, François Pienaar captained the Springboks to a victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Hosted by South Africa, after years of exile from international sports and politics, Mandela saw this world cup as an opportunity to project the image of a united and harmonious modern South Africa to an international audience. To that end, President Mandela made public his support for the Springboks during their run — culminating in him being the one to hand over the World Cup trophy to François Pienaar, a moment that became one of the most indelible images of the post-apartheid era. Wearing an orange and green jersey with Pienaar's #6 finished off with a Springboks cap, Mandela and his ANC government were all in on sports as a political tool of cultural unity.
President Nelson Mandela handing Springbok Captain François Pienaar the Rugby World Cup Trophy in 1995.
Peet Pienaar's performance was luckily delayed from the climax of rugby fever. By 1997, the Springboks' hero status had quite a few holes in it — as the club failed to significantly integrate new Black talent and clung to their logo that many Black South Africans deemed a symbol of Afrikaans white supremacy. In this narrow reading, seeing Peet Pienaar's work only as a critique of rugby rainbow politics and the Springbok, the artist was not stepping on dangerously holy ground. The reason why his work still cut against the political grain is that the 1995 Rugby World Cup was simply a trial run for ANC leadership's ambitions in the realm of football. The real objective was to host a FIFA World Cup.
Mandela had already experimented in the realm of football political theater, when he descended into Ellis Park stadium on his inauguration day to greet football fans during an international match with Zambia. By 1997, Mandela had made the formal announcement that he would not seek another term in the upcoming 1999 election. Foreseeing the transition to ANC governance without the iconography of Nelson Mandela, there was renewed pressure to create a political imaginary and imagery that could sustain the promise of the rainbow nation beyond the beloved "Madiba". The planning for a FIFA World Cup bid was in full swing by 1997, although it would take until 2010 for the country to realize that dream. Looking back at his presidency, Thabo Mbeki who succeeded Nelson Mandela as President reflected on the 2010 South Africa World Cup as among his greatest achievements. He said, "If you look now in the crowds that sit around in the South African stadia watching all these matches, it's something that you probably wouldn't have seen 10 years ago, of black and whites sitting next to each other, blowing vuvuzelas together, making a lot of noise together." The rainbow-nation-through-sports politics that Pienaar's 1997 Johannesburg Biennale performance questions, were indeed taking off in such a significant manner that they would come to largely define the post-Mandela presidency South Africa identity. Once again, the work in the Second Johannesburg Biennale would deflate the legitimacy of an important tool in the national identity construction of 1997 South Africa.
Chapter 4 | Not Ahead or Behind, But Out Of Sync
Through three examples, which only begin to tease out the complex transnational and hybrid politics of Okwui Enwezor's 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, the existing historiography and critique of this important moment in international exhibition history are exposed as utterly insufficient. There were important tensions between the politics of the biennale and the local South African audience that surrounded it — nuanced tensions that carry important insights into post-colonial statehood and diaspora-homeland relations. However, within the existing critical framework where African audiences are often figured as "behind" Western art discourse or African diasporic politics, there has been no space to effectively tease out these tensions.
In order for this to be done, future studies should consider retreating from the grammar of ahead and behind — instead leaning into probing the distinctions between the positionality of diaspora and homeland. In this project, there was a generative space opened up with an analysis of utopian diaspora politics alongside constrained homeland politics. In this paradigm, the contours of ANC nationalism were neither villainized nor justified and the transnational politics of Enwezor neither dissected nor deified. The exhibition is the space for those discursive duels to take place, and the role of African art history is to produce a scholarly conversation where Africans on the continent — a stakeholder in African art too often overlooked— are being talked to rather than talked at, talked about, or as has been tradition in art discourse, incessantly talked over.
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