Apartheid Laboratory Installation

Willie Bester
b. 1956, Montagu, Western Cape Province, South Africa
Works in Kuils River, Western Cape Province, South Africa
Apartheid Laboratory
1995
Mixed-media assemblage

At first glance, the piece almost seems like a stage set. Look closely and elements of a clinical workspace emerge. This is a space in which to imagine ourselves—as technician or as subject.
“I am sometimes tempted to go to the seaside and to paint beautiful things from nature,” Willie Bester has said. “But I do not do it because my art has to be taken as a nasty medicine for awakening consciousness.” Filled with sharp edges and menacing contraptions, Apartheid Laboratory appears to be a vision of a particularly “nasty medicine,” indeed