Constitutional Court Art Collection a tribute to social justice

The Constitution Hill precinct, which incorporates Johannesburg’s Old Fort and prison, is one of the city’s most famous modern landmarks. Chosen for redevelopment in the aftermath of the fall of apartheid 30 years ago, it is also the site of one of the most famous court buildings in the world, a working courthouse that is the home of SA’s highest legal institution, the Constitutional Court.

But what makes the complex unique is that the court building, the Old Fort, the Number Four prison and the Women’s Jail, which comprise the Constitution Hill Museum complex, has always had the relationship between art and social justice at its heart. 

In the redeveloped jails and fort building some of the most important figures in the struggle against injustice, and especially apartheid, were incarcerated, including Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

The museum uses visual art to enrich debate to educate thousands of visitors each year on social justice and SA history.  

At the centre of the relationship with visual art is the world-famous Constitutional Court art collection, which started life with one work, Humanity, by Joseph Ndlovu. It’s still a part of the collection.

The use of art as a tool to graphically display the Constitutional Court’s themes of transition, social justice, human rights, constitutional values, reparation and reconciliation was initiated in 1994 when justices Albie Sachs and Yvonne Mokgoro decided to use the décor budget to buy the artwork instead.

Since then, many hundreds of artworks have been donated to the collection, all to do with the legal and humanitarian principles of the court itself. These days, acceptance into the collection is guided by a selection committee comprising acting justices and art experts. Many of the works in the collection, such as Walter Oltmann’s wire chandeliers in the lobby, are integrated into the architectural fabric of the building itself, which became the permanent home of the Constitutional Court in 2005.

Two of the most famous artworks donated to the collection illustrate perfectly its guiding principles.

It is now installed as the work first encountered before entering the building. It depicts the brutality of the master-slave relationship: a large, yoked figure draws a cart upon which two other figures sit. Their seat is made of another human figure. The work excoriates the brutal treatment of the black body during apartheid and the broader harnessing of black labour in the colonial enterprise. The visual theme of the apartheid slave wagon was one taken up by other artists of the time, notably Julian Motau in a large drawing of that title from 1966.

The Man who Sang and the Woman Who Kept Silent (1998) by Judith Mason, or the Blue Dress, as it is colloquially known, is perhaps the signature piece of the collection. As described in its catalogue, the triptych was inspired by the execution of two liberation movement cadres by the security police, Phila Ndwandwe and Harald Sefola, whose deaths during the struggle were described at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) by their killers.

Ndwandwe was shot by the security police after being kept naked for weeks in an attempt to make her inform on her comrades. She preserved her dignity by making panties out of a blue plastic bag. This garment was found wrapped around her pelvis when she was exhumed by the TRC. One if the men involved in her killing said: “She simply would not talk... God, she was brave.” Sefola was electrocuted with two comrades in a field outside Witbank. While waiting to die he requested permission to sing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, now our national anthem. His killer said: “He was a very brave man who believed strongly in what he was doing.” A subsequent exchange between a law clerk who disputed the facts of the original TRC case, and the artist herself, which is part of the collection’s archive, illustrates how the collection is a living document of SA’s anti-apartheid struggle.

While the collection itself is bound by the founding principles of reparation and social justice that guide SA’s current constitution, the Constitution Hill complex is also a site where more contemporary and critically engaged artwork dealing with similar ideas can be staged and exhibited.

Recently, multimedia artist Jenny Nijenhuis uses the elegant atrium of the women’s prison as the installation site for her work Resonance (2022). The work is a handmade white dress stitched and stained with red thread and suspended in the atrium space by ribbons. Resonance is a reflection on the escalation in gender-based violence (GBV) in SA as it intensified during Covid-19 lockdowns. It contemplates the pain and anger informing expressions of masculinity with its underbelly of violence, and brings awareness to what became known as the shadow pandemic during the hard lockdown of 2020.

The Constitution Hill site will host The Demonstration during the FNB Art Joburg’s Open City Festival in the next two weeks. This is a series of exhibitions and talks, hosted by the Smithsonian Museum and Moleskine Foundation, reflecting on systemic racism and racial inequality.

The Constitution Hill Museum complex thus remains a perennially popular and vital part of Joburg’s art ecology — one that reminds us how important art can be in illuminating issues of redress, social justice and inequality.