South Africa’s visual culture has never been apolitical. From the community arts workshops of the 1970s and 80s — where printmaking and poster design served as tools of anti-apartheid mobilisation — to the contemporary art scene that grapples with land, memory, and post-colonial identity, the image in South Africa has always carried political weight.
This article traces the lineage from resistance art to contemporary visual practice, asking how the relationship between art and politics has transformed in the democratic era — and what it means when the urgency of resistance gives way to the slower, harder work of reconstruction.
The Resistance Art Tradition
During apartheid, art was explicitly understood as a political tool. Organisations like the Community Arts Project (CAP) in Cape Town and the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) in Johannesburg trained artists whose work was indistinguishable from activism. Linocuts circulated as protest pamphlets. Murals transformed township walls into sites of collective expression. Performance art enacted the violences that could not be spoken aloud in public.
“Under apartheid, the question was never whether art should be political. The question was whether any human act could be anything else.”
This tradition produced artists whose work still reverberates: Willie Bester’s assemblage sculptures, constructed from the detritus of township life; Durant Sihlali’s watercolours documenting the texture of Black urban experience; Helen Sebidi’s paintings mapping the psychic landscapes of dispossession and resilience.
The Democratic Transition
The end of apartheid in 1994 created a profound shift in the relationship between art and politics. The clear enemy had fallen. The moral clarity of resistance gave way to the ambiguity of nation-building. Artists who had been united by opposition now faced more complex questions: What does freedom look like? Who benefits from the “rainbow nation” narrative? How do you make art about disappointment?
William Kentridge’s animated drawings from this period capture the transition with devastating precision. His protagonist, Soho Eckstein — a white industrialist whose erasures literally redraw the landscape — embodies the uncomfortable continuities between apartheid and post-apartheid economic structures. Kentridge’s process itself is political: drawing, erasing, redrawing, leaving traces of what came before visible beneath the surface.
Contemporary Visual Activism
A new generation of South African artists has emerged for whom apartheid is history, not memory. They inherit its consequences without having experienced its direct violence. Their work engages different political terrains: gender-based violence, economic inequality, land dispossession, the politics of language and belonging in a multilingual society.
Lady Skollie’s paintings use humour, eroticism, and raw graphic energy to confront sexual violence and the policing of women’s bodies. Her work is deliberately uncomfortable — not because it depicts suffering, but because it refuses the viewer the comfort of empathy without accountability.
Haroon Gunn-Salie’s installations engage directly with the politics of memory — most powerfully in Senzenina, a work memorialising the Marikana massacre through life-size steel figures that haunt gallery spaces with the weight of unresolved justice.
Art as Political Infrastructure
What interests us at AnthroWorks is how visual culture functions as infrastructure — systems that enable other things to happen. The gallery as organising space. The artwork as catalyst for conversation. The exhibition as public pedagogy.
What we observe in South Africa is that visual culture is not supplementary to political life. It runs through it. The images that circulate — on gallery walls, on social media, on the walls of buildings — shape how citizens understand their country, their history, and their possibilities. We are watching this closely, and documenting what we find.