Context (CMS Context)
Presented by The Art Fund and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. An acquisition project to build a collection of modern and contemporary work on paper from Australia, Canada and South Africa was undertaken over 2011-13 with the support of a grant under The Art Fund's RENEW programme. The collection was developed with the expert advice and generous assistance of Annie Coombes and Norman Vorano in relation to South African and Inuit artists respectively. Khadija Carroll, Anita Herle and Diana Wood Conroy also contributed to the selection process. Obtained from Robyn Nesbitt, Artist Proof Studio Curator, The Bus Factory, 3 President Street, West Entrance, Newtown Cultural Precinct, Newtown/ PO Box 664, Newtown, 2113, Gauteng, Johannesburg.

Senzeni Marasela (b. 1977) is a highly regarded Johannesburg artist. Her work has been extensively shown within South Africa, the US and Europe (though not as yet in the UK). She works particularly in linocut and needlepoint, producing prints and fabric works that address women’s experiences of trauma and nurture, and passages from rural homes to the city.

This linocut follows the series of prints made in 2005 that took up the life of Sarah Baartman, a former slave who was toured to Britain and Europe, notoriously exhibited as a curiosity and specifically as the 'Hottentot Venus'; she was dissected and displayed after her death in Paris in 1815. Her story became a paradigm case of the voyeurism and racism of colonial culture and science, has been written about extensively, and became well-known to a broader public following the French agreement to repatriate her remains, in response to Nelson Mandela's request, in 2002. A number ofartists have produced work in response to Baartman's history, but this series is of particular interest and importance. Marasela's prints allude to the iconography of Baartman's exhibition, but foreground a celebration of a life, and its passages. By reworking even the moments of Baartman's cruellest exploitation through her own graphic idiom, Marasela represents this story as one that belongs not to the critics and discourses of postcolonial theory, but to the imaginations (and critical imaginations) of South African women such as herself; Sarah becomes a precursor of those who experiences may not be notorious, but may have been marked by common traumas of exploitations and abuse. If appropriation and re-appropriation inevitably loom large in indigenous and postcolonial art, this is a re-appropriation that is not purely theoretical, but both subtle and profound

Event Date 23/8/2014
Author: maa

Description (CMS Description)
Linocut by Senzeni Marasela titled 'Sarah', 2009. (Elsewhere titled 'That Dress and Sarah I'). Inscribed, signed and dated. Edition 3/10. Condition: Excellent
Event Date 23/8/2014
Author: maa