Mixed media: Wooden bench, barbed wire, woven leather thongs, cotton fabric and human hair. H76 x W133 x D51.5 cm

This two tiered bench/bunk/cot was inspired by my memory of racially demarcated park benches marked ‘whites only’ in South Africa. Similarly, park benches in Nazi Germany were marked ‘Nurfurarier’ (Aryans only). I constructed this sculptural work combining my responses to both my personal experiences in Apartheid South Africa and my learned understanding of the European Holocaust.

The two levels have been finished with different surfaces. The upper has a lattice of stretched barbed wire and the lower, a grid of leather thongs.

 

The leather thongs on a couch or chair refer to the old slave furniture of the Cape before emancipation, now, much sought after as collectable and valued Afrikaner relics of the past. They are called “Riempie banks”.

 

The barbed wire surface on the upper bunk has no comforting appeal and refers to the method of physically maintaining incarceration of individuals, used extensively in concentration camps, in both South Africa during the second Boer War and in Nazi occupied Europe during the Second World War.

 

Two cushions fashioned from concentration (KZ) camp-like fabric (with yellow backing) are located on the lower level and are visible through the barbed wire above. The two cushions offer an apparent comfort, which purposefully disguises the terminal reality of inmates’ incarceration. Including these cushions was somewhat provocative; intended symbolically to deliberately mislead the ‘haftling’ (inmate). This subterfuge was further paralleled by the historic use of euphemisms adorning the entrance to KZ camps, such as ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work Sets you Free) and ‘Jedem Das Seine’ (Each to their Own).

 

In formal terms modernist grids abound, in layers and projected shadows, but the whole is intentionally steeped in invoking a sense of the real.