Covid Warrior: Angelique Bougaard

Angelique Bougaard
Covid warrior
Medium: Mixed Media Sculpture (Soap and blood) 9. 5cm x 9. 5cm x 14.5mm
(encased in glass box)
TLC Student Collection (South Africa, 2020)

Overview: Attached to the handle of a metal pail is a sculpture of a left hand, composed of soap and blood

Artist's Statement: During this time of struggle each person is a warrior in their own capacity, in remote villages and townships access to water and sanitation is limited and scarce. My artwork attempts to highlight this battle to attain water which assists to combat the virus and support basic needs. The hand is made from soap and blood which symbolically addresses the fight for survival and access to sanitation while recognising the power and strength of the people affected.

Mark Auslander: The complex symbolism of water has been a long-running fascination for social anthropologists of southern Africa, dating back at least to Mrs. Hoernlé's classic 1923 essay on the social value of water.  In Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, Jean Comaroff unpacks the remarkable ritual capacities of water as a "universal solvent," in precolonial Tswana cosmology and in the religious practice of modern independent Zionism; water breaks down categorical oppositions embedded in all manner of elements (flesh/spirit, male/female, living/dead, past/future) and allows in ritual contexts for their creative recombination and integration at higher levels of experience.  In Revelation and Revolution, in turn,  Jean and John Comaroff explore early material and semiotic struggles over wells, irrigation, and rain calling rites in 19th century social fields, as Tswana leaders and British non conformist missionaries contested and negotiated power and agency on the rapidly changing South African frontier.  Water is life and water is spirit, but who controls the flows of water, and of spirit. is invariably a matter of the greatest political import.

In Angelique Bougaard's assemblage, an ethereal hand arcs over the precious pail of life-sustaining water, almost as if blessing it, or distilling its liquid essence into translucent form. In a land of great suffering, nobility of spirit endures, and unsung women laborers and worshipers continue to quench the parched bodies and souls of those in need.

Several other TLC featured artists have concentrated on the image of the hand, either gloved or ungloved, as an instrument of compassion and care or harbinger of encroaching infection, Bougaard's solitary left hand, gently grasping a water pail handle, evokes the labor of millions of people, primarily women, who carry water, often at great risk to themselves, daily in townships and rural communities that lack indoor plumbing. They are themselves essential workers, warriors in the artist's terms, even if they are rarely spoken of as such. Uncompensated or under-compensated women's labor remains at the foundation of African economies (and arguably all economies everywhere), and this vast reservoir of vital, yet undervalued, work is honored though the light-bathed hand, just about to lift up the burden of the life-giving liquid.

The deep inequality of the modern experience of Lockdown is emphasized by the carving of a hand out of soap and blood. Soap, necessary for the hand-washing that is the first line of defense against the virus. Blood, coughed out of the lungs by this dreaded pulmonary disease, which disproportionately impacts low income people of color.

Yet Bougaard does not confine herself to denouncing injustice. The floating hand, almost spectral, is oddly beautiful, an occasion of grace, as it hovers radiantly above the reflective surface of water. And this is entirely appropriate, for a remarkable feature of township worlds, in Zolani Ngwane's terms, is that everyday life is realized as an aesthetic project. There is a complex, elegant choreography to the basic labor processes on which life depends, the hauling of water and produce and charcoal, the preparation of food,  and the bathing in water of newborn infants and of the dead.

This hand is frozen in time, but it is not static; it is poised in a moment to resume its daily rounds, bringing water and all of the other necessities of life, spirit, and  love--even, especially, in our dessicated era.


References
Comaroff, Jean. 1985 Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Comaroff, Jean and John. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution. Volume 1. Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hoernlé, Mrs. R.F.A. (July 1923). "The Expression of the Social Value of Water among the Naman of South-West Africa". South African Journal of Science. 20: 514–526