This painting by the South African artist Penny Siopis depicts an African woman clutching gray drapes festooned with photographs. The painting serves as a commentary on South Africa’s colonial past, as both the photos and the woman’s skin depict a historical representation of this. The photos are all of the same picture, men standing under the Dutch flag, the Dutch being South Africa’s primary colonial force. The woman’s skin is a montage of hundreds people twisting around each other. Many of these images have different and precise meanings of their own.
South African artist Willie Bester addresses human rights with this painting. As with much of his work, the painting includes found materials as well as paint. It presents a rich collage of scenes, each symbolic of the struggle of the migrant worker.
This black-and-white painting, comprised of nine individual pieces, comments on war and genocide, a subject that the artist is very familiar with. Painter Ibrahim El Salahi was once Sudan’s cultural minister before being arrested and imprisoned by the government without trial. He endured harsh conditions during his imprisonment and concentrated as much as he could on plans for his paintings. “The Inevitable” depicts a number of people raising their fists towards the sky, an allusion to the Sudanese civil war.