CHRIS THURMAN: Finding comfort processing grief amid anger and sorrow

Over the holiday period I had the somewhat grim but also transcendent pleasure of paging slowly through Diane Victor: Prints, Drawings, Smoke.

This beautiful book, produced by French publisher Mare & Martin, presents a broad selection of Victor’s work from the past three decades, in addition to some representative earlier pieces. Essays by Renaud Faroux and Karen von Veh, along with a conversation between the artist and Francis van der Riet (director of Atelier le Grand Village, the studio where Victor has created a number of her lithographic prints) offer keen insights into what is a disturbing, gripping and ultimately revelatory body of work.

I followed a circuitous path to this experience. Victor’s book had remained unopened on my desk for more than a year; I knew I would need time, intellectual energy and emotional reserves to grapple fully with it, none of which commodities had been available in 2024. But in December I was at Spier to watch A Summer Dream — an evocative outdoor theatrical experience that has become an annual event at the wine farm — and, walking past the Old Cellar building where Victor’s book was launched in 2023, I immediately knew what my major festive season book would be. Not exactly a beach read, but so be it.

The delightful fable of Spier’s Summer Dream celebrates music and movement, but it also warns against what happens when individuals and groups (in this case a village) lose the ability to imagine, create and play. This is the shadow side of the dream: the nightmare of conservatism meeting conformity, when fear takes over, when others become Others. It is ripe ground for populists, charlatans and warmongers.

I admit that I was happy to spend the holidays with my head buried in the ground as far as crises and catastrophes, current and impending, local and global, were concerned. Yet, during what was otherwise a relaxing, easy-breezy fortnight, I found myself returning again and again to Victor’s images — a different form of attention to human folly and misery. After all, her work belongs, as Stéphane Laurent writes in the book’s foreword, in a line of artists who have “espoused the pessimistic vision of the world that haunts her”.

In her interview with Van der Riet, Victor affirms that her art addresses “things that anger or distress me ... issues that for me are uncomfortable or ignite anger ... I attempt to push against a sense of indifference”. Often this has meant direct engagement with sociopolitical matters: from HIV/Aids to government corruption, from gender-based violence to ecological degradation. Underlying these concerns, however, is Victor’s wrestle with our collective condition — our frailty, our cruelty, our mortality.

Key to this is her exploration of the relationship between humans and animals. Victor also recruits into her complex visual universe the iconography of religion and mythology, while adapting the methods and modes of Western art history to respond to the South African conditions that have shaped her identity. There is salvation, or at least comfort, to be found in the creative act itself, and in the artist’s communication (perhaps communion?) with the viewer.

I have found an unexpected form of comfort in turning again to Victor’s images after learning of the death of dancer Dada Masilo at the end of December. Masilo’s passing has devastated many in the international arts community; she was only 39 years old. In collaboration with choreographers, visual artists and musicians, Masilo fundamentally reshaped the contemporary dance scene, fusing African and European traditions as she developed a distinctive style.

To watch Masilo on stage was to encounter passion, charisma, fury and impishness all at once, fully embodied but somehow also sublimated into an experience beyond the body. It was impossible to turn your attention from her. It seems impossible now to accept or comprehend her absence.

But Victor reminds me that processing grief, amid anger and sorrow, is what art crucially enables: acknowledging loss, indeed forcing us to see and feel tragedy all around, but not allowing this to dull our sense of imagination and play. Refusing the mindset of those bleak and po-faced villagers in A Summer Dream. And embracing instead the joyful, subversive, or even mournful-melancholic sprites and outsiders who bring the village to life.

This column originally appeared in Business Day.