Artist Kim Berman's fire sermon

The artist's latest exhibition, spanning 40 years of observing of life in South Africa, celebrates 'the victory of memory over forgetting'

- Drew Forrest

Kim Berman's latest exhibition is a thing of beauty and technical mastery — though those who would prefer to bury our violent past might not appreciate her unflinching vision.

The show, which ended last week, but can still be seen in an online walk-through, tracks every South African desolation and tragedy for more than 40 years, from the death throes of apartheid to the present.

With its persistent thread of fire-blasted, smoking landscapes, it is deeply and familiarly South African. But it also offers uplifting images of redemption and rebirth.

A central image of Remembering and Forgetting — Landscapes in Dialogue is a series on the second State of Emergency, proclaimed on 21 July 1985, when one policeman told township activists, “PW Botha het gesê ons kan julle soos viieé doodmaak.” (PW Botha told us we can kill you like flies.)

But it also touches on the agonies of transition — the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, rightwing vigilantes and murderous xenophobes, the collapse of gold mining and the subterranean tragedy of the zama zama.

Even the carpet bombing of Gaza is referenced, with a South African inflection.

Berman’s 10th solo show, and first for 15 years, it holds out her intense brand of art engagé, with each jarring step on the journey seen from a humanist perspective.

Recently described as “a national treasure”, she is modest and approachable despite her high reputation. Now 65, she is on the point of retiring from the University of Johannesburg, where the retrospective has been staged.

It is arranged and colour-coded by theme, and its opening section, titled A State of Urgency, instantly resurrects for any viewer who lived through the Eighties the peculiar horror of that decade.

On one wall hangs a series of sinister nocturnal studies, in pitch-black and white, of secret police abuses in the darkness-cloaked townships and rural wastes.