Ashes to Ashes

Diane Victor, Ashes to Ashes, 2015
Paper, ash made from facsimile of miner’s handbook
150 x 200 cm
Courtesy the artist, photograph Andrea Avezzù

Victor’s ash drawings are a natural progression from
her earlier smoke drawings. Both mediums produce
ghostly images that seem about to dissolve or float
off the whiteness of the paper. For her ash drawings,
she makes use of the ash of a book that speaks to
the image that she is creating, in this instance a
miner’s handbook and a copy of the South African
constitution. The ashes are reconstituted in order to
‘become’ the bodies of the subjects of the drawings.
They are figures who have been swallowed by a
landscape or by the state that asserts its ownership
over the land, as in the case of the Marikana
miners gunned down by the South African Police,
or foreigners attacked and killed in xenophobic
violence, or illegal migrants lost in the no man’s land
between national borders. But they also emerge out
of the burned or devastated landscape. The reference
is clearly to death, to bodies broken and reduced to
bones, but also to the phoenix, to re-emergence or
uprising. In the moment of the drawing, Victor asserts
the rights of her subjects to speak, to rise against
the powers that have metaphorically pulverised or
burned them into silence.

Diane Victor was born in Witbank, South Africa in 1964. She
received a BAFA from the University of the Witwatersrand,
majoring in printmaking. Her work explores, with extraordinary
frankness and often unremitting close-up detail, the various ills
of the society she lives in, especially its many forms of violence
and abuse of power. Since 1987, she has participated in many
local and international exhibitions, including Personal Effects:
Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, Museum for
African Art, New York (2004); the Busan International Print Show
(2007); the Krakow Print Triennial (2009); Peekaboo: Current South
Africa, Tennis Palace Art Museum, Helsinki (2010); Collateral:
Printmaking as Social Commentary, Gus Fisher Gallery, University
of Auckland (2011); Impressions from South Africa: 1965 to
Now, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Earth Matters, National
Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
(2013); and Nomad Bodies, Artesis Plantijn University College,
Antwerp (2014).
Victor’s solo exhibitions include Transcend, Goodman
Gallery, Johannesburg (2010); Ashes to Ashes and Smoke to Dust,
University of Johannesburg Art Gallery (2011); Diane Victor Recent
Work, David Krut Projects, New York (2012); The Needle and the
Damage Done, David Krut Projects, Cape Town (2014); and a dust
installation, Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, at the TPA Building, Pretoria
(2014). Victor has received numerous awards, including the Wits
University Martienssen Prize, the Sasol New Signatures Award,
the Ampersand Fellowship, the Sasol Wax Art Award, and the Gold
Medal for Visual Arts from the South African Academy of Arts
and Sciences.