Apartheid Laboratory

Every hero story needs a villain. Apartheid-era South Africa standardized a villainous logic.

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.
Bester’s focus is on apartheid-era South Africa and its systems of racial classifications and their unfounded claims to scientific legitimacy and racial superiority. The work centers on seven small dolls, labeled with the seven racial categories recognized by South Africa’s government at the time—“White,” “Cape Coloured,” “Malay,” “Griqua,” “Chinese,” “Indian,” and “Other Asian.” Black South Africans were legally excluded and instead designated residents of “Bantustans,” territorial reservations—convenient political fictions—that were politically designed to remove Black claims to full citizenship.
Apartheid in South Africa ended in 1994. Yet, as a stage set upon which anyone may seemingly enter, Bester cautions us through this work to remain awake to how menacingly present such pretensions to difference can continue to be. Oppressive systems, he notes, can be built from the most mundane, and ugly, of materials. In so doing, Bester sets the stage for the consideration of Heroes’ one outright, unredeemed villain.