Some Creative Interventions to Monuments Commemorating Cecil Rhodes in South Africa
4. Juni 2025, 17.00 Uhr Kunstuniversität Linz, Domgasse 1, 4. Stock, Seminarraum
Online-Gastvortrag von Brenda Schmahmann, organisiert von Ästhetik und Pragmatik audiovisueller Medien und dem Co.Lab Erinnerungsarbeit • ästhetisch-politische Praktiken.
British imperialist, mining magnate, politician and the founder of the southern African country called Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Rhodes was unscrupulous and racist. Many of his actions resulted in the dispossession of local peoples. Most notably he authored the Glen Grey Act (1894) when he was prime minister of the Cape Colony in South Africa, legislation which forced black men into migrant wage labour and limited their economic choices.
On 9 March 2015, Chumani Maxwele tossed a bucket of excrement at the sculpture of Cecil Rhodes that was prominently placed at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Memorable for marking the beginning of the #RhodesMustFall movement, this act was also a creative one. Coinciding with the annual Infecting the City festival, Maxwele’s was deploying performance to enable social critique.
Maxwele’s was not the first creative intervention that has happened at a monument to Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town and nor has it been the last. In this lecture it will be suggested that, whether done with permission or unauthorized, various creative interventions have happened at monuments to Rhodes. Serving as a powerful vehicle for offering critique about Rhodes himself, these interventions have also drawn attention to a range of social concerns as well as prompted thought about monuments themselves and how they function in the present.
Brenda Schmahmann is Professor and holds the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. An art historian, she has done extensive work on public art in South African art and is co-editor of the Taylor & Francis journal Public Art Dialogue. In addition to sole-authoring more than 85 articles or book chapters, and guest editing many special issues of journals, she has authored, edited or co-edited nine books. Her tenth book, a volume she edited titled Contemporary Approaches to Commemorative Public Art: Monumental Developments will be published by Routledge in August 2025. She is currently authoring a book on monuments to Cecil Rhodes.
Co.Lab Erinnerungsarbeit • Ästhetisch-politische Praktiken
Ästhetik und Pragmatik audiovisueller Medien
