Post-Apartheid Guernica (2014-2021) is a mixed-media installation by Sharlene Khan and Mokgabudi Amos Letsoalo that explores themes of violence and oppression by state forces. Post-apartheid Guernica primarily references the Marikana massacre of 34 miners by the South African Police Service on the 16th of August 2012 during protests for increased wages. Not since the days of apartheid has South Africa witnessed such a public slaughter of civilians engaged in social protests, but this was a culmination of many different incidents where black lives are wasted by the police force. This multi-media work moves between literary, documentary and popular culture references to question what allows ordinary citizens, rarely with critical education, to don a uniform and then become the ‘thin blue line’ regulating ideas of morality and criminality in society? Increasingly across the world police institutions are used as repressive arms of state forces, crushing citizen dissent. We see uniformed individuals enacting their racist, gendered, sexed, classed fears and imaginations of the Other with legal sanctioning. Thus, while Post-Apartheid Guernica starts with South Africa as its focus, the work speaks to police and militaristic oppressions linked with right-wing nationalistic governments world-wide.

The performance Come Home – A Call focuses attention on the effects of violence on the families of victims, in particular women. Women who have been left behind, women who wait, women who cry, women who mourn in the everyday ordinariness of extraordinary violence. This performance pays homage to a history of faded pictures.

Credits:
Performance: Sharlene Khan, Mokgabudi Amos Letsoalo, Litho Nqai, Mandlakazi Zilwa, Sehlorana Kekana, Nono Motlhoki and Dumelang Nthlane
Funding: Sharlene Khan, Mokgabudi Amos Letsoalo, Wits Arts Research Africa Grant, with thanks to the Khoj (India) and Gyeonngi (South Korea) Residency Programmes and the Partage Workshop (Mauritius)