Annie E. Coombes
The day before I was due to travel to Lesotho for the start of a new research project, 15 March 2020, I was in Cape Town with friends, glued to the television. President Cyril Ramaphosa had just announced the closure of land and sea borders to protect South Africa from the rampant spread of a new virus, Sars-CoV-2 (Covid-19). I was struck by the contrast between his reassuring statesmanship and the shambolic performance of our UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, as he blustered through his media appearances. My next response was panic and a scramble to find a flight out of South Africa before airlines shut down and I was unable to get back to my son and partner.
On my return to England, I decided to use the small gallery space I directed as part of my job at Birkbeck, University of London, to foreground the uneven experiences of the growing pandemic in different parts of the world. In those early days, it was already clear that only some countries were going to be the beneficiaries of Big Pharma’s rush to find the magic bullet vaccine. Among the winners of the three initial commissions for the online exhibition at the Peltz Gallery was a collaborative video, and related embroidery works by South African artists Rosana Maepa (Mapula Embroideries Project, north of Tshwane) and Veronica Betani (Keiskamma Art Project, Hamburg).[1][Figs. 1 & 2]
The video (conceived as a series of illustrated WhatsApp exchanges between Maepa and Betani) and the embroideries (developed through conversations about each other’s daily lives) graphically highlighted the challenges presented by the Covid pandemic in small rural communities across South Africa. The artworks addressed the loadshedding, which produced erratic power supply; the anxiety of having to share crowded public transport to travel considerable distances for grocery supplies; the hard-won college and university places deferred or even abandoned due to the pandemic; the lack of food security; the fear of an indiscriminate disease that targeted the most vulnerable, often ending in death; the anxiety that plans for the future of children and grandchildren would now come to nothing. For a South African audience this had a horrifying feel of déjà vu about it, recalling the deadly impact of the Government’s AIDS denialism and subsequent reluctance to roll out antiretrovirals (ARVs) nationwide between 1999 and 2008, under Thabo Mbeki’s leadership.
To understand the significance of the Keiskamma Art Project’s engagement with health and illness we need to go back to this earlier pandemic. Internationally, the 1980s were grim. The medical profession’s early research into the mystery illness that would come to be known as HIV/AIDS inevitably produced inadequate solutions, which cost the lives of many. Stigma and exclusion followed diagnosis as moral and media panic exacerbated the desperation of those affected. After the euphoria of the first democratic elections in 1994, the brutal illness, eventually understood to be a virus, began to ravage South Africa, systematically working its way through swathes of the population. It decimated, in particular, the most economically disadvantaged communities, who were only just beginning to recover from the violence and abuses of apartheid. The fishing village of Hamburg in the Eastern Cape, where Keiskamma Art Project (KAP) is based, was no exception. A long history of under-development in a region disadvantaged by successive waves of colonial, apartheid and bantustan governments, meant that the Eastern Cape was particularly vulnerable to the impact of HIV/ AIDS.
In the international context, visual and material interventions became central in transforming and informing public opinion around HIV/AIDS. There is one enduring example of particular relevance to the Keiskamma Art Project (KAP). Initiated in San Francisco in 1987, the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt ingeniously mobilises techniques of making and embroidery usually associated with the private and the domestic, in the service of the public and the monumental. Turning conventional notions of memorialisation on its head, the Memorial Quilt uses the gendered craft of sewing and patchwork to create an extraordinary alternative memorial of monumental proportions. [Fig. 3] The quilt, which is still growing, now commemorates more than 48,000 individuals—each remembered with a 3-foot x 6-foot (c.1 metre x 2 metre) panel—who have died from AIDS or HIV-related illnesses. [2] Many factors contribute to the effectiveness of the quilt as both a consciousness-raiser and a memorial, not least the fact that it was first displayed on 11 October 1987 in that quintessential site for memorialising US events and individuals of national importance: the National Mall in Washington DC.
In South Africa it became clear that while many of the most economically deprived populations were sceptical of any biomedical scientific rationale for HIV in the earlier years of the pandemic, experiential explanations were much more effective as a pedagogic tool. Research for the AIDS and Society Research Unit (ASRU) at the University of Cape Town on the work of Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) peer educators, confirmed the importance of using personal testimonies, storytelling and narrative.[3] Many of the visual strategies deployed by artists and creative practitioners combined these elements to great effect.[4] Additionally, the act of making, particularly in collaboration, became recognised as a valuable technique for enabling difficult conversations. These were powerful tools in the context of the painful stigma resulting from the disclosure of a positive status, or the understandable reluctance to test, prior to the provision of ARVs, when a positive diagnosis held little hope of recovery. To raise awareness of the life-threatening situation in South Africa, a spate of important international art exhibitions was organised. The Durban Art Gallery, for example, under the directorship of Carol Brown, staged an exhibition in collaboration with David Gere’s global project ‘Make Art/Stop AIDS’ at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which included work by Keiskamma Art Project.[5]
While Keiskamma Art Project began as an economic empowerment initiative for rural Xhosa women, it has since acquired an international reputation for its large-scale multimedia artworks, many of them highlighting the challenges of living with HIV. Small wonder then, that KAP has also had such a significant impact nationally in promoting HIV/AIDS awareness through collaborative art projects.
When medical doctor and artist Carol Baker established the Art Project in 2000, she hadn’t intended to practise medicine. However, recognising the critical need for medical aid in Hamburg and the surrounding area, she set aside her original intention and re-trained as an HIV specialist, eventually setting up a hospice and clinic (Umtha Welanga) in 2005, and enlisting the help of Eunice Mangwane, an HIV counsellor and care worker from the Western Cape. Between them and with the help of others, they attempted to educate the community about the necessity of testing, while allaying the fear of a positive result. Interviews I conducted with members of the Keiskamma community in 2009, 2011 and 2013, highlight the extent of misinformation about HIV in the early days of Mbeki’s tenure, and the prejudice against those who tested HIV-positive. In one of these interviews, Eunice spoke tearfully about how, in those early years of the pandemic, and despite the fact that her husband was originally from Hamburg, she was treated with suspicion and hostility as an outsider working with a white doctor. Ostracised and excluded, she and Carol nonetheless persevered to counteract the various myths about how the virus was spread (contracted during the process of testing; via white powder distributed by planes overhead; injected by the Doctor herself) and the community’s reluctance to test. [6]
Just as other NGOs had felt the need to sidestep Government restrictions, Baker found ways and means to supply the community with ARVs, including with the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and by paying for supplies out of her own pocket. These were controversial decisions in the face of Treatment Action Campaign’s fight to secure Government provision of ARVs, but provide a measure of the desperation felt by those working closely with communities being torn apart by the virus.
Recognising that smaller craft items would be priced out of the market if women employed by the Art Project were paid a reasonable wage for their efforts, Baker had the foresight to concentrate on attempting to win large commissions.[7] Her idea was to work from concepts inspired by iconic European artworks but to re-interpret them as large-scale multi-media artworks, drawing on local crafts and skills, which spoke directly about the histories and lives of those who produced them.[8]
As the devastating effects of HIV began to dominate the life of the small Hamburg community, the art projects needed to fulfil the demands of both mourning and memorialisation. In addition, if the community was not to collapse under the weight of despair, it needed to provide another, more proactive function—to affirm life and to inspire the community to take action against the disease as well as provide an income to support the living.
The women who collaborated on the Keiskamma Tapestry (May 2004) speak movingly about the effect it had on them personally, increasing their self-esteem through an understanding of local and national histories, which they learnt as part of the design process. This knowledge had been denied them under the restrictions of Bantu education during apartheid:
The first time I started to learn about the history of my ancestors is … when we were doing the Keiskamma Tapestry. It was so interesting. I had never known about all those wars and the reasons why they happened. I also did not know how my family came to be in Hamburg—all the Xhosa kept moving around, I learnt. Now I know where I come from, and where my ancestors come from. I know about the history of my people, it makes me feel good inside, and a little sad about all the bad things that happened, but we can make it right now. [9]
This historical knowledge, which has often been a key component of the training on many projects undertaken at Hamburg, played a major role in fostering self-esteem. All the women I interviewed emphasised the importance of education and training prospects offered through the Keiskamma Trust and its associates.
The designer and embroiderer Nomfusi Nkani is a case in point. Her ambition before working with KAP was to earn money from domestic work in either East London or Port Elizabeth, because no qualifications were needed for domestic work. However, an opportunity arose to study fine art at Walter Sisulu University of Technology in East London when she and four others were offered bursaries by the Claire Kantor Foundation in the USA[10] . (The Foundation had been set up by Carol Baker’s sister Jill and her husband Seymour Kantor in memory of their daughter Claire, who was studying towards a fine art degree at Florida State University when she was tragically killed in a car accident.) By the time of my second interview with Nkani in 2015, Nomfusi was teaching basic skills in fine art to Grade 9 pupils as part of a pilot project funded by the National Lottery and the Department of Arts, Culture and Education. Her life ambition was transformed by this experience into a desire to become a full-time teacher.[11]
One of the works that has perhaps been most successful as a means of raising funds and awareness about the wider effects of the HIV pandemic on local communities in South Africa is the Keiskamma Altarpiece (2004–5). Based on the 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald and Nikolaus von Hagenau, painted to celebrate deliverance from the plague and ergotism, or St Anthony’s fire, the Keiskamma version is truly monumental. Standing 4 metres high and reaching about 6.8 metres wide when fully extended, it is a tour de force, deploying older local traditions of beadwork and Xhosa pearl button work, wirework, photography, embroidery and appliqué. The artwork was highly effective as an international ambassador. In 2006, it toured to a number of international venues, including St James’ Cathedral in Toronto, St James’ Episcopal Cathedral in Chicago, London’s Southwark Cathedral and a widely reviewed exhibition at the Fowler Museum, UCLA, where it was described as a ‘present-day folk-art masterpiece.’[12]
The Altarpiece was also one of the first Keiskamma artworks to incorporate identifiable individuals from Hamburg and their personal stories. [13] By foregrounding and celebrating the role of specific women in mitigating the effects of HIV/AIDS on this tight-knit community, it invites the viewer to recognise the resilience of women in general as nurturing forces in local communities across South Africa, as it is typically mothers and grandmothers who sustain the melded and extended families that have become a legacy of the AIDS pandemic. [14]
By 2009 (completed in 2010), Baker had extended the visual strategy of appropriating a well-known icon of European art to another ambitious project, by remaking Pablo Picasso’s Guernica in the image of the community at Hamburg. [15] In an embroidered, beaded and felted version of Picasso’s anguished masterpiece (made to similarly monumental scale),[16] the Hamburg artists transposed the powerful protest against the Nationalist forces’ massacre of innocent civilians during the Spanish Civil War to the Eastern Cape, to embody the community’s harrowing struggle against HIV. To understand the impact of the Keiskamma Art Project’s transformation of Picasso’s masterwork, we need to know a little about the complex history and afterlife of his Guernica and how its various appropriations are compounded to produce particularly powerful readings for the Keiskamma version.
The bombing of the Basque town of Gernika on a busy market day, 26 April 1937, was undertaken by German and Italian squadrons ordered by the Spanish Nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco. It is the first known instance of what later became familiar as ‘carpet bombing’—the indiscriminate mass bombing of (in this instance) a civilian population —decimating the town and its inhabitants. At its inception, Picasso’s Guernica was already a highly political statement, being the centrepiece of the Spanish Pavilion organised by the short-lived Republican Government at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, at the very start of the Spanish Civil War. Picasso himself recognised the potency of his work and, when the Republicans lost the war, he refused to have the painting displayed in Spain until the end of Franco’s dictatorship and the restoration of democracy. The original remained in the Museum of Modern Art in New York until it was brought ‘home’ to Spain in 1981, where it now resides in the national museum – Reina Sofia – in Madrid. Because of this complex history, Picasso’s Guernica has become an iconic image, often used to foreground the horrors of mass civilian killings, represented by the perpetrators of such violence as the inevitable ‘collateral damage’ of war.[17] The painting exposes the lie behind that hideous euphemism, distressingly relevant in the context of the mass civilian killings in the ongoing wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine. Its monumental scale contributes to the experience of the work as a memorial to those who were killed in Gernika on 26 April 1937.
Guernica’s historic legacy and the iconic, universal quality of the image made it a particularly effective artwork for the Keiskamma artists to revisit and re-appropriate. Those who produced the Keiskamma Guernica are quick to point out the difference between the two versions, however, explaining that theirs ‘depicts not an instant of horror but rather a slow eating away at the whole fabric of a community. Each day another thread is lost, and suddenly an entire generation has disappeared. It has seemed that as we stitched in panic and in sorrow against this disintegration, more holes have appeared and gaps that could not be mended. While the foundations of a new wealthy and privileged society have been built up, we have dug countless graves.’[18]
Key to its success in the South African (and specifically Eastern Cape) context is that the Keiskamma version has successfully ‘Africanised’ and ‘localised’ the original Guernica. [Fig. 7] Where Picasso’s horse holds centre stage, the Keiskamma artists have introduced a cow, since cattle (specifically Nguni long-horn cattle) are so central to the political and economic well-being of the community, being implicated in lobola (bride price). It is also a reminder of the prophetess Nongqawuse’s disastrous but desperate insistence on how killing the stock of cattle (upon which the wealth of the community depended) would dispel the coloniser and result in the return of ancestral lands to the Xhosa in the region. A group of mourners in traditional Xhosa mourning dress have been inserted into the bottom right-hand side of the work, and the words of those combating HIV have been embroidered into the very body of the central cow. Along the border of the work are beaded AIDS ribbons and square metal plaquettes with the names of those who had died in the years preceding completion of the Keiskamma Guernica. [19]
The Keiskamma Guernica forces the viewer to recognise the multiple massacres that have shaped this small community. It shows that the local Xhosa population in Hamburg suffered a heavy death toll not only in the land wars (known as the Frontier Wars) between 1779 and 1878, but also as a result of the withholding of life-saving ARVs by Mbeki’s government. This decision resulted in more than 330,000 avoidable deaths nationwide—akin to a massacre. Despite State roll-out of ARVs, by the time the Keiskamma Guernica was completed in 2010, only a small percentage of those eligible for the drugs were actually receiving them and members of the Hamburg community had to travel long distances under difficult conditions to attend the Government’s distribution clinics.[20] Consequently, as in the case of Picasso’s Guernica, the Hamburg artwork acts as a warning to future governments and as an effective memorial to the unnecessary deaths of innocent civilians during the period of AIDS denialism and its aftermath in South Africa.
Recently Keiskamma Art Project has received further international recognition and esteem for its representations of illness and health. In 2017, it was awarded the commission of a tapestry to mark the 500th anniversary of the prestigious medical association, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London. The new artwork was unveiled to the sound of the Keiskamma Music Academy in December that year. [Fig. 8] On permanent display at the Royal College of Physicians, the new Keiskamma tapestry and embroidery celebrates 500 years of medical history and includes portraits of RCP founder Thomas Linacre (1460-1524) and patron King Henry VIII of England, together with delicately embroidered pages from key historical medical texts including William Harvey’s early treatise (1628) on veins and arteries depicting how blood circulates in the body.
Part of the efficacy and power of the Keiskamma Art Project resides in its ability to cross genre boundaries. In this way, small-scale economic empowerment ‘craft’ initiatives have become large-scale artworks acting as international ambassadors for the cause of HIV awareness, while crucially still maintaining local relevance. The domestic intimacy of embroidered, beaded, quilted piecework, sewn at home, has translated into the monumental expressions of the Keiskamma Altarpiece and the Keiskamma Guernica, which have gained significant traction through their display around the world. Running through these examples and the processes that have produced them, is the importance of narrative and personal testimony.
In the Keiskamma Art Project we have clear evidence of the power of art as a tool for advocacy and for healing. The Project’s creative visualisation of personal stories has transformed the complex medical and social data of multiple health education initiatives into a ‘felt’ knowledge, an experiential understanding that has empowered the community to deal with the challenges, not only of HIV/AIDS but of Covid-19 too. Ultimately, art has saved many lives in this small fishing community and the villages beyond.
Bibliography
Clark, T.J. ‘Picasso and Tragedy.’ London Review of Books 39, no. 16 (2017): 33.
Coombes, Annie E. ‘Witnessing History/ Embodying Testimony: Gender and Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Special Issue, 2011): 92-112.
----. ‘Positive Living: Visual Activism and Art in HIV/AIDS Rights Campaigns.’ Journal of Southern African Studies 45, no.1 (2019): 143-174.
----. Interview with Eunice Mangwane at Umtha Welanga clinic, Hamburg, 8 December 2009.
----. Interview with Carol (Baker) Hofmeyr at her home in Hamburg, 5 December 2009.
----. Interview with Nomfusi Nkani, Keiskamma Art Project shop, Hamburg, 18 February 2015.
AIDS Art/South Africa at Iziko: South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 2003–2014, collaborating with Wellesley College, USA. Bodies of Resistance (1999 – 2000), a collaboration between the New York organisation Visual AIDS (dedicated to increasing public awareness of AIDS through the visual arts), the Natal Society of Arts in Durban and Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut.
Keiskamma Trust pamphlet on the Keiskamma Guernica: 2010.
Lessons from Lockdown: Learning from the Pandemic, Video ‘I See You Vero. I See you Rosina: Our Common Threads’ (September 2020); Embroideries: Veronica Betani (assistant embroiderers: Nosiphiwo Mangwane, Fokiswa Madlingozi, Nomuelo Paliso), ‘Knowing You Through Embroidery, Rosina’ (2020), Rosina Maepa (assistant designer: Kelelo Maepa; assistant embroiderer: Julia Makoana), ‘Vero’s Life in Hamburg During Covid-19’ (2020). London: Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck, University of London, 2020.
Miller, E., J. Smetherham and J. Fish. ‘The “Nevergiveups” of Grandmothers Against Poverty and AIDS: Scholar-Journalism-Activism as Social Documentary.’ Kronos 38, no. 1 (2012): 219–48.
Morgan, Jonathan and the Bambanani Women’s Group. Long Life: Positive HIV Stories. Cape Town: 2003.
Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Available at http://www.aidsquilt.org/about/the-aids-memorial-quilt. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
Not Alone: An International Project of Make Art/Stop AIDS. Durban: Durban Art Gallery and the Fowler Art Gallery at UCLA, 2008. Touring Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Los Angeles between 2008 and 2010.
Rubincam, C. ‘Peer Educators’ Responses to Mistrust and Confusion about HIV and AIDS Science in Khayelitsha, South Africa.’ ASRU Working Paper no. 343 (UCT, August 2014): 1-43.
Schmahmann, Brenda. Ed. Material Matters. Quagga Books, 2000.
Schmahmann, Brenda. ‘Patching up a Community in Distress: HIV/AIDS and the Keiskamma Guernica.’ African Arts, 48:4 (2015): 6–21.
----. The Keiskamma Art Project: Restoring Hope and Livelihooods. Print Matters Heritage and Keiskamma Trust, 2016.
Shelver, A. ‘Offerings at the Altar: “Life is to Share”: The Keiskamma Art Project, HIV/AIDS and Herstory.’ (Unpublished BA Honours dissertation). Rhodes University, 2006.
Thomas, Kylie. Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality after Apartheid. Bucknell University Press, 2014
UCLA Africa Studies Centre. ‘The South African Keiskamma Altarpiece on display in Santa Monica.’ Available at http://international.ucla.edu/africa/event/5701. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
Wienand, A. ‘Portraits, Publics and Politics: Gisele Wulfsohn’s Photographs of HIV/AIDS, 1987-2007.’ Kronos 38, no.1 (2012): 177–203.
[1] Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck, University of London, ‘Lessons from Lockdown: Learning from the Pandemic,’ Video ‘I See You Vero. I See you Rosina: Our Common Threads’ (September 2020) ; Embroideries: Veronica Betani (assistant embroiderers: Nosiphiwo Mangwane, Fokiswa Madlingozi, Nomuelo Paliso), ‘Knowing You Through Embroidery, Rosina’ (2020), Rosina Maepa (assistant designer: Kelelo Maepa; assistant embroiderer: Julia Makoana), ‘Vero’s Life in Hamburg During Covid-19’ (2020). For an important collection of essays on the history of the Mapula embroidery project see Brenda Schmahmann, ed. Material Matters (Johannesburg, 2000).
[2] The history and a list of ongoing exhibitions of the ‘Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt’ is available at http://www.aidsquilt.org/about/the-aids-memorial-quilt , retrieved 9 October 2018.
[3] C. Rubincam, ‘Peer Educators’ Responses to Mistrust and Confusion about HIV and AIDS Science in Khayelitsha, South Africa,’ ASRU Working Paper no. 343 (UCT, August 2014), 1–43.
[4] For more detailed accounts of visual art and activism in relation to HIV/AIDS in South Africa see, Annie E. Coombes, ‘Witnessing History/ Embodying Testimony: Gender and Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Special Issue, 2011) 92–112; Annie E. Coombes, ‘Positive Living: Visual Activism and Art in HIV/AIDS Rights Campaigns,’ Journal of Southern African Studies 45, no.1 (2019), 143–174; Kylie Thomas, Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality after Apartheid (Plymouth, 2014); Jonathan Morgan and the Bambanani Women’s Group, Long Life: Positive HIV Stories (Cape Town, 2003); A. Wienand, ‘Portraits, Publics and Politics: Gisele Wulfsohn’s Photographs of HIV/AIDS, 1987–2007,’ Kronos 38, no.1 (2012), 177-203.
[5] See the collaboration between Durban Art Gallery and the Fowler Art Gallery at UCLA, which produced the exhibition and catalogue Not Alone: An International Project of Make Art/Stop AIDS (Durban, Durban Art Gallery, 2008) touring Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Los Angeles between 2008 and 2010. See also AIDS Art/South Africa at Iziko: South Africa National Gallery, Cape Town, 2003–2014, collaborating with Wellesley College, USA. Bodies of Resistance (1999–2000) was a collaboration between the New York organisation Visual AIDS (dedicated to increasing public awareness of AIDS through the visual arts), the Natal Society of Arts in Durban and Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut.
[6] Annie E. Coombes’ interview with Eunice Mangwane at Umtha Welanga clinic, Hamburg, 8 December 2009.
[7] Annie E. Coombes’ interview with Carol Baker at her home in Hamburg, 5 December 2009.
[8] Brenda Schmahmann’s The Keiskamma Art Project: Restoring Hope and Livelihooods (Cape Town, 2016) provides detailed histories of many of the extraordinary works produced by the artists in Hamburg. I am foregrounding a few which, I believe, encapsulate the range and far-reaching impact of the Project.
[9] A. Shelver, ‘Offerings at the Altar: “Life is to Share”: The Keiskamma Art Project, HIV/AIDS and Herstory’, (unpublished BA Honours dissertation, Rhodes University, 2006), 53. Special thanks to Amy Shelver for sharing her excellent dissertation which contains some of the most detailed research on the Keiskamma Art Project available.
[10] The four students who studied fine art were Nomfusi Nkani, Cebo Mvubu, Nokupiwe Gedze and Kwanele Ganto. A fifth student, Zukiswa Pakama, studied journalism.
[11] Annie E. Coombes’ interview with Nomfusi Nkani, Keiskamma Art Project shop, Hamburg, 18 February 2015.
[12] UCLA Africa Studies Centre, ‘The South African Keiskamma Altarpiece on display in Santa Monica,’ available at http://international.ucla.edu/africa/event/5701, retrieved 18 December 2018.
[13] A. Shelver, ‘Offerings at the Altar,’ 61.
[14] The women who are involved in KAP are at pains to emphasise that not everyone in the community is HIV-positive and that those whose health is not compromised by the virus play a crucial role as carers. See also an account of the GAPA (Grandmothers against AIDS and Poverty) in Khayelitsha: E. Miller, J. Smetherham and J. Fish, ‘The “Nevergiveups” of Grandmothers Against Poverty and AIDS: Scholar-Journalism-Activism as Social Documentary’, Kronos 38, no. 1 (2012), 219–48.
[15] For a full account of the making and exhibition of the Keiskamma Guernica, see Brenda Schmahmann, ‘Patching up a Community in Distress: HIV/AIDS and the Keiskamma Guernica’, African Arts 48, no. 4 (2015), 6–21.
[16] 349.3 centimetres x 776 centimetres (Picasso’s Guernica is 350 cm x 782 cm).
[17] See T.J. Clark, ‘Picasso and Tragedy’, London Review of Books 39, no. 16 (2017), 33, where he lists some other contexts where Picasso’s Guernica has been appropriated: Ramallah, Kolkata, Oaxaca and Belfast.
[18] Carol Baker, quoted in a Keiskamma Trust pamphlet on the ‘Keiskamma Guernica’ (2010).
[19] In the original commission, the felted, embroidered and beaded work was part of a larger installation, which had a special significance for a local Eastern Cape constituency and included a thorn bush kraal. Keiskamma Art Project, ‘Keiskamma Guernica,’ designed by Carol (Baker) Hofmeyr, assisted by Nokuphiwa Gedze, Nozeti Makhubalo, Nombuyiselo Malumbezo, Veronica Nkosazana Betani, Cebo Mvubu, Florence Danais, Grace Cross, Gay Staurup, Buyiswa Beja, Nomfusi Nkani, Bandlakazi Nyongo, Magda Greyling, Thobisa Nkani.
[20] Brenda Schmahmann, ‘Patching up a Community in Distress: HIV/AIDS and the Keiskamma Guernica.’ African Arts, 48:4 (2015), 9.
