State of Disaster: Kim Berman

by Pamela Allara and Mark Auslander

Day 11 of South Africa's The Lockdown Collection highlights two monotype (single copy) landscape prints by Kim Berman, one of the co-organizers of The Lockdown Collection project: State of Disaster and World on Fire,  State of Disaster, adapted from a press photograph, depicts a "squatter camp" after its residents in 2017 in Johannsburg's Newtown area, were violently cleared, under court orde rby members of the Red Ants private security service.  World on Fire shows a firefighter fighting a massive wildlife in Australia.

Kim Berman, States of Disaster, 2020

Kim Berman, World on Fire, 2020

Artist's Statement on State of Disaster. Monotype, 76cm x 112cm


The source of this image is a documentary photograph of an informal settlement of urban migrants in Newtown after they were aggressively removed by the army of “red ants” during the winter of 2017, provoking a spike of xenophobic attacks in the inner city.

This work is a tribute to the resilience of migrants from across the continent and within our borders trading informally in the inner city to enable them to send food parcels home to their families.
Where are they now?


Artist Statement on World on Fire. Monotype: 76 x 112cm

A fireman attempting to hose a wall of fire that destroyed millions of creatures in the rampant Australian bush fires, is eerily reminiscent of the Covid-19 pandemic. This plague, as well as environmental destruction, is caused by incidents of our own making.

My hope is that this lockdown period will encourage introspection, an increased awareness of our common humanity as well as collective agency to contribute to social and environmental justice.



Pamela Allara; Kim Berman’s new monotype landscapes, State of Disaster and World on Fire, visualize her responses to the coronavirus pandemic that has shut down South Africa, as well as much of Europe, Asia, and the United States. Berman’s art is rooted in her belief in the power of creative art to transform lives. As an artist-activist, she founded the community printmaking studio, Artist Proof Studio (1991- ), the Paper Prayers for AIDS Awareness program (1996- ), and Phumani Paper, handmade paper for sustainable development and job creation (2000- ), all of which are functioning today.

Kim Berman, fter the Removals, Dobsonville (1994)

When she has the time apart from full-time teaching at the University of Johannesburg and ongoing involvement with the aforementioned projects to turn to her own work, Berman engages with landscape as subject. She has stated that “Landscapes in my work have always provided a metaphor for our transitions as a country,” (Berman 2009).  For Berman, South African history and culture are rooted in the landscape, specifically the broad, sparsely-vegetated plains around Johannesburg: the highveld. They also serve as the arena for the upheavals caused by the traumatic transitions the country has undergone since the end of apartheid.

For example, After the Removals, Dobsonville, a drypoint and collograph from 1994, the year apartheid ended with Nelson Mandela’s election as President (Allara 2010). The abandoned cooking pot in the foreground and the empty tents in the far background speak powerfully to people—both South Africans and migrants-- the government has  forcibly subjected to constant eviction from their makeshift shacks in informal settlement, which no matter how unstable, at least provide the temporary spiritual solace of home.

With State of Disaster, Berman shows us that traumatic history is not past despite the change in leadership. The image could have been made in 1994 or earlier, but in fact the source is a documentary photograph from three years ago. The rock-strewn foreground brings the eye to a wall of destroyed shacks, with a single battered folding chair standing as a fragile monument to the lives that have been upended. Looming over them are the skyscrapers of Johannesburg, dark shadows of the hope that brought the migrants to the city. The image may be current, but elicits memories of the xenophobic riots of 2008, when unemployed men attacked migrants and destroyed their lodgings while yelling “Go home or die here!”

World on Fire is also based on a documentary photograph, but uncharacteristically, Berman derived it from the horrendous fires from 2019-20. Once again, the landscape is a metaphor, in this case for those fighting the pandemic on the frontlines. And although in this instance the documentary source was in Australia, the fires set on the highveld around Johannesburg in the winter to burn down the brush and prepare for new growth in the spring were a key metaphor for her Fires of the Truth Commission series from 1999-2000. That series was populated only by the bright flames on the dark ground. In the new monotype, the addition of the lone fireman vainly attempting to arrest the all-consuming blaze speaks directly and clearly to the obstacles faced by the medical community as they attempt to contain the spread of the virus.

Both prints address current incidents while evoking South African history as it is written, rewritten, buried and exhumed.

Mark Auslander on State of Disaster: At a time when the nation, and much of the world, has been officially “locked down” in their homes, we are soberly reminded of those who have been deprived of homes altogether. For me, the “punctum” of this image, in Roland Barthes’ terms, the thing that pierces the heart, is the solitary empty chair noted by Pam, its red upholstery or stuffing  (its heart?) punctured and spilling out. The upholstered chair, the symbolic heart of a household, seat of the pater familias or materfamilias lies abandoned, its core ripped out. Splotches of red are glimpsed on the rocky ground of the middle foreground, below the chair, and to its left, as if they are traces of the blood that has drained out of the invisible, removed family, wrenched from the precarious home they had carved out in the city. As Pam notes, this is not something done by a virus, or by the Apartheid regime, but by present day corporate interests sanctioned by modern municipal authorities, agents of the post-colonial state in the name of order, planning, and law.

I find myself thinking of the scalding final scene of the 1980 film Breaker Morant, in which the two colonial protagonists are executed by firing squad, paper targets pinned over their hearts. Being officers they are entitled to be shot sitting down in chairs, and thus they meet their demise in a seated position. The removed family in “States of Disaster” has not been sentenced to death by an official court martial, but they very likely will not survive  the current crisis, on the streets or wherever they have been consigned. In Kim Berman’s brilliant adaptation of a haunting photograph from three years ago (which now seems an eon ago), we are all placed uncomfortably in the position of witnesses, complicit in a de facto extra-judicial execution, as we gaze at the empty chair and the wrecked dreams of yet another subaltern community.

Mark Auslander on World on Fire:  In World on Fire, Kim Berman brilliantly explores the parallels between bush wildlfires and viral pandemics. It is worth recalling that  Michael Crichton's 1969 speculative novel The Andromeda Strain, which shaped so much of our current thinking about pandemics, was set  in a secret underground government laboratory, codenamed "Wildfire, covertly devoted to the production of bioweapons.  Like viruses, wildfires turn their immediate environs, their 'hosts,' into factories through which they exponentially proliferate. In struggles against pandemics and wildfires, those on the front lines are perilously at risk: Berman's solitary firefighter is dwarfed by the searing conflagration. In both phenomena it becomes difficult to disentangle where the defender and the invader each begin and end: the spray of water shot from the firefighter's hose takes on the same burning white color as the  advancing wall of flame behind it.

Staring at Berman's startling print, glowing with a nearly radioactive intensity, I have the uncanny sensation of looking into the mysterious interior of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the pathogen that seems now to haunt our every waking and sleeping moment.  We behold a terribly beautiful creative force, turning living organic material into endlessly-ramifying instruments of destruction: the fragile, burning tree limbs seem like RNA strands seizing control of helpless host cells, spewing out more pathogens to feed the unquenchable outbreak. As the novel coronavirus wreaks havoc within the human pulmonary system, so are the vast wildfires, from the Amazon to the Australian Outback, internally choking off the lungs of the planet.  As the artist notes, these are crisis ultimately of our own making. They demand, like Black Lives Matter, a decisive call to collective action: "We can't breathe."

References

Pamela Allara. 2010. Dislocation and Collaboration: Recent Prints by Kim Berman
African Arts Vol. 43, No. 4 (WINTER 2010), pp. 20-29

Kim Berman, 2009.  A case study of Phumani Paper as a Community Engagement initiative at the University of Johannesburg. Education as Change.  Volume 11, 2007 -Issue 3 Pages 37-45