Abstract
A comprehensive campaign to boycott apartheid South Africa was formalized in the second half of the twentieth century and the art world took its stance, too. Notably, South Africa remained uninvited to the Venice Biennale for over two decades since 1970. Retrospectively it is well remembered as the years of exclusion by South Africans – a post-apartheid myth that is investigated by this paper. A closer historical analysis finds that a South African visual art world managed to avoid cultural boycott policies that were strictly monitored from within the country by the African National Congress’s cultural desk. In fact, as art historian Mario Pissarra has noted, an analysis of the South African art world’s activities during this time might lead one to ask ‘Boycott – what boycott?’. This paper considers the politics of South Africa’s absence from some parts of the international art world – tracing the contours of a cultural boycott. It asks how the disinvitation to one of the world’s most important international biennials affected a local South African art world – in ideology and practice – and consider some of the ways that this exclusion was addressed from within the country. It highlights also the country’s triumphant though awkward ‘return’ to the international arts community by considering the politics of what is locally regarded as the controversial Johannesburg biennials. It seems that the apartheid boycott may now be studied with enough distance to extract lessons about the art of hospitality elsewhere in the world.
Presenters
Annchen BronkowksiPostdoctoral Research Fellow, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—The Art of Hospitality
KEYWORDS
Apartheid, Boycott, Identity, Representation, Biennials, Sociopolitics
