War’s endless death and displacement

I’m standing in the tranquil interior of 16 Dixon Street, the shared home of handwoven rug company Fibre Designs and art gallery RK Contemporary, in the heart of Cape Town’s trendy De Waterkant district. Despite the cosy premises, I’m ruminating over death, depravation and displacement: perpetual war.

Far away, bombs and ground troops continue to devastate Palestine and Ukraine. Warfare of one kind or another rages in various corners of our own continent. And there is violence closer to home too, of course: the war on women’s bodies, gang wars, the daily brutality of life for many people in SA.   

The twin exhibitions on display at RK Contemporary connect such present-day conflicts to the bloody 20th century and, in particular, World War 2 around which it turned. While Ade Kipades’ Massacre of the Paint Tubes responds to Israel’s war on Gaza with stinging and sardonic oil paintings, Ingrid Piprek’s AFTERMATH — Making Art from War translates the trauma of adolescent experiences from 1945 into “fibre art”.

AFTERMATH is curated by Klaus Piprek, the artist’s son, who has also produced a fine book combining his mother’s narrative accounts of this period of her life with images of the “stitched, painted, appliquéd, woven and bleached” cloth works she produced many years after the events. Ingrid Piprek was 14 when the Russian forces entered what had been West Prussia — a chunk of present-day Poland incorporated into the German reich but relatively unaffected by the war until it was “liberated” by the Red Army.

For Piprek and her community, this spelt disaster as they were kicked out of their homes and effectively press-ganged into Soviet servitude. Terrified, hungry and freezing, they managed to flee to what became West Germany. The story is told in a series of panels, each representing a key episode in the journey.

Kipades, for his part, insists that we recognise how the refugee’s tale is an archetypal one, and that it defines the fate of the Palestinian people. It has been thus, according to the UN, since 1946. Over the past year, millions more have been displaced by Israel’s relentless bombardment.

I travelled to De Waterkant through the neighbouring Bo Kaap, whose residents have made it clear, in dozens of murals and slogans, that they stand with Palestine. Among the messages of solidarity, there were one or two expressing quiet despair: what can we do from so far away? For artists, this question is easily answered (make art!), but the follow-up questions (why? how? to what end?) introduce something of a dilemma.

In Massacre of the Paint Tubes, Kipades explicitly represents that problem by making artistic materials — standing metonymically for artists themselves — prominent components of the subject matter. In Damned If You Do And Damned If You Don’t, a squeezed-out paint tube is skewered by the geometry of abstraction.

Much of Kipades’ previous work has been executed through abstract expressionism, but in this exhibition figuration and portraiture are prominent. Is there a quiet protest here about the inconsistent grounds on which artists are criticised? Sometimes they are “too political”; sometimes they are accused of irrelevance. In the piece from which the exhibition takes its title, a version of Goya’s firing squad takes aim at a cluster of cowering paint tubes.

The other difficulty for artists wishing to express horror at wartime atrocities is that we are inured to images of suffering — we see blood as if it were paint squeezed from a tube. Kipades also cleverly points to our collective complicity by affixing to icons of the military-industrial complex the apparently innocuous logos of global consumer culture: the many vested interests that perpetuate Palestinian misery by justifying Israeli belligerence.

But Kipades does not seek to harangue the viewer. Instead, his anger is aimed squarely at political leaders — Bibi Netanyahu, of course, but also those in the US who defend Israel: from President Joe Biden and secretary of state Antony Blinken to Donald Trump, the gamesman-statesman. If Kamala Harris does win the presidency in November and there is no shift in US policy towards Israel-Palestine, she can expect scathing treatment in a Kipades portrait.

• ‘AFTERMATH’ and ‘Massacre of the Paint Tubes’ are at RK Contemporary until August 10.

This review originally appeared in Business Day.