Dislocated Landscapes

Responding to sporadic outbursts of xenophobic violence in South Africa over the past couple of years, Kim Berman offers an incisive new body of work, translating the concomitant trauma of migrants under siege into stark, bleak and scorched landscapes, executed in a series of etchings, lithographs and monotypes. Her new work augments the exposure she received in Boston in 2009 with the first series of these landscapes. Her latest landscapes drive home the fact that very little has changed over the past two years to change attitudes towards issues of ‘the other’ and of displacement and resettlement of migrants.

She explains her work in the following manner: “In May 2008 South Africa erupted in a wave of xenophobic violence. Black African people from countries other than South Africa were designated as ‘other’ using the pejorative term amakwerekwere. The extreme violence, which included burning victims alive, killed sixty two people and displaced thousands. The authorities responded by rounding up foreign nationals and moving them, ‘for their own protection’, into tented encampments in outlying areas. After six months the inhabitants of these camps were forced back into the communities that had ejected them so aggressively, where they again faced marginalization and the threat of violence. Many were deported back to their countries, others simply ‘disappeared’.

I created a series of etchings comprising a landscape constructed from splicing together two unconnected spaces into a co-joined but disjunctive space. The United Nations white refugee tents temporarily provided for the dispossessed on the edge of South African cities became a stark symbol of the nation’s failure to accommodate diversity.

The etchings, drawings, and monotypes in the second series of work were inspired by seemingly unrelated landscape images that I photographed around the time of the xenophobic violence. In June of 2008, rural areas close to the town of White River in Mpumalanga province were consumed by vast forest fires. It was necessary for farmers to revive their badly damaged exotic fruit orchards by drastically pruning down the trees and painting them white with lime in order to protect the exposed bark from the sun and possible disease. For me the fields of white amputated trees in regimented rows visually enacted the predicament of the alien; the shameful drastic marking and control of the other. Exploring this imagery through a range of visual art techniques offered me a way of processing and exploring both the fragility of South African democracy, and of integrating and accommodating radical dislocation into a deceptively ordinary landscape.

In my work, landscapes have always provided a metaphor for South Africa’s transitions as a country: even in a poisoned, burnt, or smoke-filled landscape, the light on the horizon sparks the energy and hope for the cycle of change and imperative of renewal. The work speaks of a stark, sterile, dry, cold, empty, white, regimented aftermath of earlier fire, violence and chaos. But winter is part of a cycle, and its moment does pass.” (Adapted from the Artist’s Statement by Kim Berman published in the online journal, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism: The Salon, Volume 2, May 2010 http://jwtc.org.za/the_salon/volume_2/kim_berman_alien_landscapes.html)

Kim Berman is associate professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Johannesburg and the founder and executive director of Artist Proof Studio, a community-based printmaking centre in Newtown. She received her BAFA from the University of the Witwatersrand and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Art/Tufts University in 1989. She initiated the Paper Prayers campaign to promote HIV/Aids awareness through the visual arts in 1997. Berman received government funding in 2000 to implement a national poverty alleviation programme, Phumani Paper, which supports small enterprises nationally in handmade paper and craft. She has lectured and exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally. She completed her PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2009 with a thesis entitled ‘Agency, imagination and Resilience: Facilitating Social Change through the Visual Arts in South Africa’.