Andries gave an interesting talk as part of the opening reception on July 16 from 5:00-5:30 onThemes in Contemporary South African Art. While the talk was about other South African artists, here is Andries's Artist Statement:
ANDRIES FOURIE: ARTIST STATEMENT
My work concerns itself chiefly with the issues of memory, identity, cultural hybridity, guilt and the legacy of colonialism in post-Apartheid South Africa. I examine these themes through the lens of my own experience, and the history of my own family.
As an Afrikaner (a white South African of Dutch descent) I view the present through the lens of a complicated past. Even after three hundred years in Africa Afrikaners are still torn between seeing themselves as European colonists or indigenous Africans. This sense of displacement and confusion is a direct result of apartheid’s mythology of ethnic and cultural purity. Apartheid left South Africans with little more than fiction for history and a fractured shell for a collective identity. South Africa’s various ethnic groups are currently involved in the process of weaving together their many different cultural strands to create a new national identity. I want to make work that contributes to this egalitarian and open-ended process that is so essential to national healing and reconciliation.
The fluid cultural mix that results from an encounter between different cultures and traditions is far more interesting to me than any romanticized notion of cultural purity which aims to fix a culture in an unchanging state of suspended animation. Culture is a vibrant, shifting and changing force that defies our impulse to freeze it in time like an artifact in a museum. I am fascinated by the hybrid, the subaltern, the improvised. I suppose that I am partly drawn to these examples of cultural blending because they expressly contravene the rigid, patriarchal prohibition against “mixing” cultures that was so important to the apartheid-era society I was raised in.
In this specific installation/body of work, I look at Afrikaner identity from two perspectives. On the one hand I examine the theme of complicity and guilt by responding to Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness”. I have relocated the themes of the novel (which addresses rapacious colonial exploitation in the Congo in the late 1800s) to a contemporary South African setting, and use it to critique my own people’s continuing treatment of black South Africans.
On the other hand I also include work that examines the positive aspects of traditional Afrikaner/Boer culture. I will specifically be looking at those themes, tenets and examples I encountered while visiting the diasporic Boer community in Patagonia, Argentina. This community, which was founded by Boer exiles in 1902 in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war, and has been effectively severed from Afrikaans culture in South Africa for over a hundred years. Their language, customs and traditions represent a rare and valuable time-capsule that preserves pre-apartheid Afrikaans traditions that have been spared the Germanicization and “purification” that played such a large part in the implementation of Afrikaner nationalism between 1948 and 1994. My maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother were both born in Patagonia, but returned to South Africa in 1938.
It is likely that the viewer might experience a sense of confusion when confronted with these two very different views of Afrikaner identity. Any reasonably self-reflective Afrikaner feels this confusion every day. Only when we’ve reconciled these two conflicting aspects of our culture, our history and our sense of self will we be ready to participate fully in reconciliation and the creation of a new, shared South African national identity.
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