Terri Dunbar-Curran
“HE gets too much airtime,” yells a passerby. “He stole our land, the bastard!” High above him on a cherry picker, artists Haroon Gunn-Salie and Bevan Thornton continue applying a thick coat of silicone to Jan van Riebeeck’s left hand.
The duo was in town on Freedom Day making molds of the hands of statues of Jan Van Riebeeck and Bartholomew Diaz in Adderley Street, and Cecil John Rhodes in the Company’s Gardens, as part of Gunn-Salie’s latest installation Soft Vengeance. The works are being created specifically for the South African pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, which runs from May 9 until November 22.
As Gunn-Salie ensured the layer of silicone was thick enough before leaving it to cure for hours, it looked like Van Riebeeck was wearing bright pink kitchen gloves, drawing attention from motorists and pedestrians alike.
“I’d been planning an act of vandalism towards memorials for about a year,” explains Gunn-Salie. “I was watching with interest from Johannesburg the Rhodes Must Fall campaign.” He found it inspiring, but realised that his original concept had essentially been “usurped”.
“But that was fantastic,” he adds. “My intention was to spark a debate around colonial and apartheid memorials.” Which is exactly what the Rhodes Must Fall movement succeeded in doing.
Gunn-Salie says that the xenophobic attacks of the past three weeks have prompted him to look even closer at his work, and the connection between violence focussed on a symbol and the violence erupting on the streets.
“It was very important to rethink the work,” he says, adding that the final idea began to take shape during a National Department of Arts and Culture meeting. He explains that the debate around the Rhodes sculpture has brought the issue of colonial and apartheid memorials to the fore, and it is finally being addressed and discussed by those in power.
“It’s not my role as an artist to campaign for removal of a memorial, or for one to stay,” he says. “My role is to take the conversation forward.” That’s something he aims to do with all of his artworks and installations.
The organisers of the Venice Biennale were very interested in what Gunn-Salie did with his project Zonnebloem Renamed, which saw him renaming roads in District 6, and they are similarly intrigued by the thinking behind Soft Vengeance.
While Zonnebloem Renamed involved printmaking, this latest body of work sees him using silicone to make “three dimensional photo copies” of parts of the memorials. He has decided to show the hands of the statues in a new way, devoid of context. The idea being that viewers will be struck by the disproportionate nature of their own hands in comparison. “To see the power ascribed to these people, and how everlasting that power is,” says Gunn-Salie, adding that the memorials have become visual symbols of how we as Africans could never hope to accomplish such levels of greatness.
“In presenting just the hands, one will see how ‘small and insignificant’ we are in relation to history and these identities.”
Another interesting aspect Gunn-Salie has taken into account while planning this project is symbolism. “Rhodes is a good example as to how thinking has changed. He’s evidently ‘hailing’, but back then that gesture wasn’t yet associated with Hitler or Nazism. As symbols have changed so too has our reading of them.”
As Thornton puts the last few coats on Van Riebeeck’s left hand, Gunn-Salie squints up at it. “I don’t know if in five years time this statue will still be here. Cecil John Rhodes unveiled it in 1899. It was sculpted by John Tweed – the empire’s sculptor. This is the lineage of dominance.”
The significance of the molds of Van Riebeeck’s hands being part of the Venice Biennale, says Gunn-Salie, arguably lies in the comments President Jacob Zuma made earlier this year: “A man with the name of Jan van Riebeeck arrived in the Cape on April 6 1652... What followed were numerous struggles and wars and deaths and the seizure of land and the deprivation of the indigenous peoples’ political and economic power... The arrival of Van Riebeeck disrupted SA’s social cohesion, repressed people and caused wars.”
Gunn-Salie says that the effects of apartheid and colonialism still persist today and that these memorials, the symbols of power, “perpetuate a national consciousness of inferiority”. He hopes that Soft Vengeance will draw attention to the lack of transformation in this country’s public spaces.
“These leaders of the past, who stand entrenched in statues, monuments and memorials, both symbolically and through the legacy of undemocratic history, have blood on their hands,” writes Gunn-Salie in an outline of Soft Vengeance. “The task of restorative justice, 21 years into our democracy is vital, in fostering an African identity through transformed public spaces and challenging autocratic symbols of the past, without destroying them. This needs to be done through the inclusion of all, young and old, to set us on a progressive trajectory. South Africa’s public spaces are bereft of symbols of the trauma of the people, past and present. It is a stark reminder of how much work is yet to be done.”
The hands will be mounted, protruding from a wall, leaving the viewer to imagine the “ghost” of the full figure beyond them.
Besides “smuggling” the casts of Van Riebeeck’s hands through customs, an important part of the symbolism of the work, Gunn-Salie will present an entire “gallery of leaders” at an exhibition at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in August, and hopes to bring the exhibition to Cape Town towards the end of the year.
As the issue of colonial monuments is at last addressed, the question many are asking is: where exactly does their power lie? “It lies in their scale, disproportionality and permanence,” says Gunn-Salie.
l Follow @Gunn_Salie on Twitter, www.goodman-gallery. com/artists/haroongunnsalie