Donovan Ward

© Donovan Ward, 03/04/2012

Ideally art is a space for exploration, playing and learning. This work is the antithesis of creativity as its producers abdicate their individualised voices to work within a predetermined framework. This work is presented as a primed, colour by numbers canvas with a portrait, in black line, of an influential, powerful recognisable person who speaks for government and who has gained notoriety for his racialised comments. The lines mark out areas where 10 premixed colours are to be applied. Each area is numbered to correspond to the supplied colours. Viewers are invited to assist in sequentially painting it by referring to the colour code and painting instructions. The completed painting reveals this subject as altered identity. The restrictive, predictable method and outcome of production also metaphorically illustrates the simplistic way people are essentialised or constructed by power elites .

Donovan Ward,
Ingekleur: Outside The Lines The AVA Gallery, Cape Town l 12 March – 4 April 2012

On 3 March 1986 in the township of Gugulethu, seven youth were murdered by the South African state. The Gugulethu Seven memorial, dedicated to these seven youth who lost their lives during the liberation struggle, is located in close proximity to where the killings occurred. The memorial is built from Rustenberg granite, steel, screws, tile adhesive, bronze, bricks, cement and concrete. The sculpture represents a discontinuous wall like structure. The seven figures cut out from the concrete and granite slabs speak to the seven families and the nation’s loss. The poses representing the seven youth are suggestive of play, dance and resistance, as it seeks to capture their humanity and spirit despite their absence. Their silhouetted forms are derived from the stenciled and spray-can art of the 1980s. On the supporting plinth, beneath each figure, is a bronze plaque with information on it dedicated to one of the youth. Each one of the seven youth are represented in this way. The bronze plaques do not all bear portraits and dates of birth (due to the non-availability of personal details of certain of the youth). Each of the seven plaques however contain the name and date-of-death of the youth. The layout and wording of the plaques are styled on the silk-screened type commemorative posters of the 1980s. The work pays tribute to and commemorates those who made the ultimate sacrifice to build a better South Africa and indeed world. The work is also representative of nation building, as it displays elements of ruin or incompleteness juxtaposed with areas that appears to have been recently built, thus echoing the Nicaraguan woman poet Vidaluz Meneses message: “Pain has been our challenge and the future our hope. We build as though composing a poem: writing, erasing, and creating anew”. These words reflect the spirit of the memorial, as it captures elements of completeness and incompleteness; ruin and visible structure, regularity and irregularity, asserting graphically and symbolically potential, possibility and hope.

Donovan Ward & Paul Hendricks Details of image: Finished drawing for Memorial

© Donovan Ward, 11/12/2005

Generalised representations become fixed within a culture and conceptualised as if ‘true’ because constant repetition in a variety of forms and locales validate the oft repeated image and lends credibility to mytholised forms. Barbara Buntman, Whose Identity do we see? Born in 1789 in the vicinity of the Eastern Cape, Sara Bartmann lived for a short period as a slave near Cape Town. Baptised in in 1811 as Sara Bartmann, a ‘Hottentot’ from the Cape Colony, her indigenous name is unknown to us. It was in England and later Paris that Sara Bartmann was displayed as a sexualized exotic object, and subjected to medical and anthropological scrutiny. In Paris she allegedly lived as a prostitute, and after her death there in 1818 her dissected body was displayed at the Musee de lâ Homme as a museum curiosity. It was only 184 years later, in 2002, that her remains were repatriated to her homeland, where she was buried as a Khoisan woman near the little town of Hankey . Sara Bartmann has become a controversial and contentious historical figure, as many groups and individuals claim the right to represent her, and have contested the various roles she apparently assumed. Sara Bartmann most probably belonged to the Gonaqua tribe, and was called many things in her lifetime. These included a ‘slave’, ‘Hottentot’, ‘showgirl’ and ‘prostitute’. Presently, she continues to be labeled an ‘exotic aboriginal woman’, ‘Khoisan woman’, ‘ouma’, ‘mama’, and ‘mother of the nation’. This work attempts to explore the complexity of an African Identity as it relates to Sara Bartmann. It challenges stereotypical representations of community and fixed identities associated with race, class, culture and language. While on the one hand this work acknowledges Sara Bartmann as a national icon symbolising South Africa’s fragmented history, I also selected her image to highlight the manner in which historical images and symbols have been appropriated and commodified in a world of commercial interests.

Donovan Ward

Past land theft and new forms of dispossession, particularly gentrification, the desecration of burial sites by property developers, and more generally the erasure of physical memory, one that connects people to history, are engaged with in varying degrees in this artwork. Alluded to in this piece as well, are forms of real estate development, which corresponds with global neo-liberal models that drive ‘development’ projects but are disproportionately harmful to the environment and human beings.

Made from fabricated, organic and inorganic objects, this art piece, the size of a grave, constitutes a landscape embodying contradiction, contrast and paradox. The fictitious sections of the work include plastic flowers, razor wire, cement, and a synthetic lawn used at burial ceremonies superimposed on indigenous flora and fauna. Remnants of the natural environment were collected from the lower slopes of Table Mountain, close to an encroaching residential area, and incorporated into the work; they include bone fragments, dead insects, stones, bits of dried indigenous plants, leaves and gravel.

Through juxtaposing the artificial with the real and superimposing the synthetic over the natural, this work speaks to the displacement of the natural and native by imitation and simulation. It, moreover, points to the paradoxical role of technology in exposing yet furthering the ‘dis-placement’ and ‘re-placement’ of the natural and indigenous with simulated fictive environments.

Donovan Ward

2023: print co_lab, Michaelis Galleries, University of Cape Town
2022: Palimpsest, Leeuwenhof Slave Quarters Remembrance Gallery, Cape Town
2019: There and back to see how far it is, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town.
2016: Beyond Binaries, Essence Festival, Durban.
2015: In Print/In Focus, Michaelis Gallery, University of Cape Town.
2012: Ingekleur: Outside the Lines, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town.
2001-12: Natural Selection, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town.
2010: View from the South, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town.
2009: In Black and White, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town.
2009: Sex Power Money, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town.
2009: Wood, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town.
2007: ReCenter, X Cape, Look Out Hill, Khayelitsha, Cape Town.
2007: Africa South, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town.
2007: Greenhouse: From Painting to Plastic, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Somerset West, South Africa.
2006: Anthology, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town.
2006: 20 artists 06, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town.
2006: 20 artists 06, Art on Paper Gallery, Johannesburg.
2005: Botaki Exhibition 3, Old Mutual Asset Managers, Cape Town.
2005: Man, Rust-En-Vrede Gallery, Cape Town.
2004: Upfront and Personal, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town.
2004: Botaki, Old Mutual Asset Managers, Cape Town.
2004: Art Cool, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town. 
2004: Gender and Visuality, University of the Western Cape, Bellville.
2004: 10, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town.
2003: Supermarket, Klein Karoo Nationale Kunstefees, Oudtshoorn, South Africa. 
2001: Telling Tales, 3rd I Gallery, Cape Town.
2000: Allsorts, Bell-Roberts Gallery.
2000: Praat, Thetha, Talk, Idasa Gallery, Cape Town.
2000: One City Festival, Returning the Gaze, Public Art Project, Cape Town.
1999: Prophecy 2000, 3rd I Gallery, Cape Town.
1999: New Beginnings, Battswood Art Centre, Grassy Park, Cape Town.
1998: Dis Nag, Iziko South African National Art Gallery, Cape Town.
1998: Urban Objects of Desire, Mau Mau Gallery, Cape Town.
1998: Ekhaya, Tsoga Environmental Resource Centre, Langa, Cape Town.
1997: District Six Public Sculpture Project, District Six, Cape Town.
1997: The Legacy of Steve Biko, District Six Museum, Cape Town.
1997: Committees Choice, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town.
1996: Barricaded Rainbow…,  Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, Cape Town.
1996: 5 Cape Artists, Iziko South African National Art Gallery, Cape Town.
1996: Beyond the Rainbow, Athlone Civic Centre, Cape Town.
1995: Outsider Art, Market Gallery, Johannesburg.
1995: Volkskas Atelier Award National Exhibition, University of Stellenbosch.
1995: Volkskas Atelier Award Regional Exhibition, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town.
1994: Man on Woman, Seeff Trust Art Gallery, Cape Town.
1993: The Art of Peace, Seeff Trust Art Gallery, Cape Town.
1991: Community Arts Project Exhibition, Woodstock, Cape Town.
1990: Pieces of Africa, Athlone Technical College, Cape Town.