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Cutting Anti-Apartheid Images: Bongiwe Dhlomo's Activist Linoprints

The paper is one of a collection of peer-reviewed academic papers presented at the IMPACT 6 Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference, Bristol 2009.

It results from on-going research into visual culture production by South Africa women artists, and is related to 'Women and Art in South Africa' (1996), the first book to focus on South African women artists, and 'From Union to Liberation: South African Women Artists 1910-1994' (2005, co-edited with Brenda Schmahmann); reviewed African Arts Summer 2009, Vol. 42, No. 2, p. 90

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/afar.2009.42.2.90?journalCode=afar

¶ During the apartheid era, few black women were able to train as artists; Bongiwe Dhlomo (b.1956) studied printmaking at Rorke’s Drift mission art school and, like her male peers, she created editions of black and white lino cuts. The paper analyses her visual representation of the spatial politics produced by apartheid ideology and reads her figurative imagery as evidence of the diasporic condition generated by the Nationalist Government’s forced removals policy. In assessing her commitment to political activism, it discusses images which narrate the human suffering resulting from relocating black people and suggests that her work is notable for its expressionistic, empathetic portrayal of actual experiences and avoidance of the rhetorical and symbolic imagery characterising much work by her male contemporaries. This paper extends research on South African women artists and their work, evaluates the interface between African sexual politics and black patriarchy, and begins a focus on printmaking in KwaZulu-Natal. Presented at an international conference, it introduced politicised South African art to an audience with little detailed knowledge of this work or of its significance. The paper contributes to a slowly expanding literature on South African art, and introduces new knowledge into the fields of gender and postcolonial studies through an interpretation of work by Bongiwe Dhlomo, now an established artist and arts administrator.