Soft Vengeance

Haroon Gunn-Salie, Soft Vengeance, 2015
Reinforced urethane
c. 170 x 150 cm
Courtesy the artist, photograph Andrea Avezzù

Gunn-Salie presents Soft Vengeance for the South
African pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale. In this
ongoing series of sculptural works, Gunn-Salie draws
attention to the lack of transformation of educational
institutions and other public spaces in South Africa.
Racism and the effects of apartheid persist, and the
colonial legacy is reflected in symbols that dominate
and define the urban landscape, and by extension,
the mindset of South Africans. Nelson Mandela’s
negotiated settlement of 1994, and the subsequent
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, have meant
that many things have continued as before for most
South Africans, and that symbols of the colonial past
remain precisely where they have always been.
Following a month-long, student-led movement
at the University of Cape Town, a statue of British
colonialist Cecil John Rhodes was removed from the
campus on 9 April 2015. In the weeks following this
protest, other memorials throughout the country were
defaced with coloured enamel paint.
Soft Vengeance presents the blood-stained
hands of Jan Van Riebeeck, cast directly from a
statue of the Dutch colonist in Adderley Street
in the city of Cape Town. The rest of his form is a
ghosted presence, unseen beyond the drywall.
The dismembered hands, the first of several
similar works, will serve as an appropriation and a
rearticulating of disquieting symbols of power, and a
reflection on what their legacy has engendered.
Haroon Gunn-Salie was born in 1989 in Cape Town, and is
currently based between Cape Town and Johannesburg. He
completed his BA Honours in sculpture at the University of
Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2012. Gunn-Salie’s
collaborative art practice translates community oral histories
into artistic interventions and installations. He utilises a variety
of mediums and he is particularly concerned with forms of
collaboration in art that are based on dialogue and exchange.
Gunn-Salie’s MA graduate exhibition, Witness, was a sitespecific
work focusing on forced removals under apartheid. To
create Witness, he worked with veteran residents of District
Six, an area in central Cape Town where widespread forced
removals occurred under the apartheid regime. In 2013, Gunn-
Salie exhibited on group exhibitions at the AVA Gallery in Cape
Town, Stevenson, Cape Town, and the Goodman Gallery in
Johannesburg. In 2010 he won the Barbara Fairhead Prize
for Social Responsibility in Art at the University of Cape Town
and in 2013 was a merit award winner in the Sasol New
Signatures competition.