YOLA BALANGA

Afterimage(s) by Nina Strand:

Yola Balanga, from the series Born of the Earth.

The word ‘fuck’ on a pink painting is the first thing I really notice while walking around the Cape Town Art Fair for the second year in a row. The word, written on the hand-colored paper, sums up many of my feelings after just having seen the return of the fascist salute for the second time in such a short span of time.

We are, in some ways, at rock bottom. The past has become the present. I watched the film on Lee Miller on the plane here and was reminded of her reportage Believe It, published in Vogue in June 1945. Her haunting documentation from a concentration camp proved what really happened during World War II. Have we learned nothing? We didn’t. Apartheid was established in 1948. I’m confronted with blurry Holga camera images in black and white from the site of multiple executions of political opponents listed by the Afrikaner government in this town. It faces a collage featuring a floating black woman’s head in a blonde wig, surrounded by objects like a pant line and a cartoon rabbit. It hurts. We are all fucked.

I can’t stop thinking of the suffering here—officially ended in ‘94, but still. I am the tourist. Always. Just like when I visited Vienna and, while passing the art academy, thought of what might have been avoided had he been accepted there. I think of how Elon Musk’s grandparents emigrated from Canada to this country in support of apartheid. Musk holds Canadian citizenship through his mother, Maye, who was born in Canada. Now, many Canadians are signing campaigns to remove his citizenship. They don’t want him, and I’m guessing this country doesn’t either.

I long to join the surfers in a diptych I pass. It could offer a needed pause, but politics continue, in another two-work collage showing two women sporting large headpieces full of images from different manifestations. This is what many carry, symbolising the worry that never ends, the protest that never rests.The large blue Post-it note with the words ‘Technically, this piece can be considered a painting’ and the smaller red one on the side, stating ‘Not for sale (edition of 3)’ offer some smiles, as do the men in large pink kaftans and the women in gold- and silver-embroidered dresses flâneuring around the fair, champagne in hand, only there to be seen. They might pass quickly by the work in a triptych depicting a woman crawling out of a too-tight cave, and what I will carry with me is the artist’s quote on how Nature is a Black Woman.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.