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| Contemporary Art of the Khoi-San of South Africa |
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| 28th March 2001 to 12th May 2001 | 
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Over the last two years the October Gallery has mounted an ongoing series of exhibitions from shamanic cultures which have explored the art produced by Aboriginal Australian, Huichol Indian and Peruvian Amazon artists respectively. Between late March and early May 2001, the Gallery presented a rare opportunity to view the art of another shamanic culture, the San people of the Kalahari desert region of Southern Africa.
Now understood to be one of the oldest cultures surviving into the present from very ancient times, the San people are best known today as direct descendants of those earlier groups whose highly stylised rock art is found decorating rock walls and caves throughout Southern Africa. Some of these rock paintings have been dated to 27,000 years BP, and the highly evolved tradition of this very ancient and beautiful form of painting was maintained until relatively recent times.
Formerly semi-nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers, the San have seen their ancient ways severely disrupted ever since the first arrival of Dutch settlers on their ancestral lands. Treated in ways recalling the manner in which the American Indians were abused on their own sacred territories, the San groups that survive today have been further divided and scattered due to recent political conflicts, having been forced from one country to another by the succession of liberation struggles taking place in Angola and Namibia. Today they exist as semi-political refugees forcibly resettled in some of the most barren areas of the Kalahari where they continue to practice what remains of their traditional culture, eking out the barest of existences from an arid and hostile environment. Unlike the elegant pictures of eland hunting and the highly spiritualised world that their ancestors depicted on the rock faces in former times, the art of the San of today tells of a displaced culture caught between the familiar world of the past and the harsh exigencies of the present - yet still somehow capable, in their expressive paintings and strikingly simple linocuts, of sounding a message of hope in the face of continuing adversity.
This exhibition took place in association with Melt 2000 who, during the months of April and May, brought a number of San musicians to the UK to perform a series of concerts and give workshops, both at the October Gallery and elsewhere in London, under the project title of SanScapes. The art exhibition, celebrated one of the oldest cultures alive today, and served as a curtain-raiser to the Celebrate South Africa festival that the South African High Commissionorganised to focus attention on the unique and highly diverse patchwork of different ethnic groups that make up the complex weave of that ‘rainbow nation.’ The exhibition proved to be a tremendous success with many of the works being sold. Articles about the exhibition appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including a major write-up in Germany's Frankfurter Algemeine. |
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