Visualizing justice: Human rights discourse through the lens of the ArtbankSA’s contemporary collection

As South Africa commemorates Human Rights Month, the nation engages in critical reflection on its trajectory from the systemic brutality of apartheid to a constitutional democracy ostensibly founded on principles of dignity, equality and freedom. While the country’s Constitution is rightfully celebrated as one of the most progressive legal frameworks globally, the sober reality for many South Africans remains characterized by persistent structural inequality and unresolved human rights challenges.

Using powerful visual narratives, contemporary South African artists are confronting these sociopolitical contradictions and deploying their creative practices to bring attention to struggles and inequities that frequently remain obscured in the mainstream discourse. Their works function as both aesthetic expressions and forms of civic engagement, contributing to a visual vocabulary through which human rights concerns can be articulated and interrogated.

The ArtbankSA collection features significant works that serve as both witness and protest, documenting the complex and often contradictory human rights landscape of the present-day South Africa. Three artists in particular—Themba Khumalo, Asanda Kupa and Lebo Thoka—create compelling visual testimonies that engage with ongoing struggles for dignity, equality and justice, thus extending the nation’s human rights discourse beyond purely legal or political domains into the realm of cultural production and visual representation. 

Housing Rights and forced removals

Themba Khumalo’s poignant work Red Ants (2019) addresses one of South Africa’s most persistent challenges: the right to adequate housing. Created in response to a violent confrontation between the Red Ants security company and informal settlers in the Emfuleni district in 2019, the artwork captures a traumatic moment when homes were demolished while families were still asleep.

Using coffee stain and charcoal as his primary media, Khumalo transforms the South African landscape into a politicized space of contestation. The striking contrast of red figures against the sombre terrain articulates a narrative of ongoing housing struggles—a stark reminder that nearly three decades after apartheid’s formal dissolution, spatial justice remains elusive for many South Africans. The work raises critical questions about human dignity, security of tenure and the fundamental right to shelter. The apartheid regime systematically enforced racial segregation through various legislative mechanisms, leading to forced removals of Black South Africans from their homes and communities.

The Natives Land Act of 1913 marked the beginning of formalized land dispossession, which continued throughout the apartheid era, resulting in significant socio-economic disparities that persist into the present, as Okem and his co-authors observe: “Land dispossession during the colonial and apartheid periods is at the root of the poverty, inequality, vulnerability and precarity of black South Africans to this day, which manifests in many dimensions including housing.” (Okem et al. 2019: 29).

Khumalo’s evocative use of minimal colour against the muted landscape speaks to how the land itself bears witness to these historical and contemporary struggles. The artist has remarked in his statement that “the South African landscape has become political whilst the earth should or could be also a spiritual place for prayer and solace” (Khumalo 2019). Red Ants testifies that inequities in land distribution perpetuated through forced removals persist well into the democratic era.

The forced removals executed by the Red Ants security force in 2019 demonstrate the continuing contestation over space and belonging. The landscape, in Khumalo’s rendering, becomes a repository of memory and trauma experienced by displaced families. As Field writes, “Imagine the community and surrounding landscape you grew up in, that surrounded you throughout your formative childhood years. What if you and your family were forcibly removed because you did not comply with an externally imposed racial identity category, which decreed that you no longer live in the spaces and interact with the people you regarded as your community? Imagine then your experience of a part of yourself being “amputated”. How would your life change after the moment of amputation? How would you remember your life before amputation?” (Field 2012: 18).

Khumalo’s Red Ants thus functions not merely as creative commentary but as a visual archiving of ongoing human rights violations in contemporary South Africa. By rendering the continued practice of forced removals through his distinctive painterly language, Khumalo establishes continuities between apartheid-era dispossession and present-day housing insecurity. The work invites viewers to consider how constitutional guarantees of housing rights remain unrealized for marginalized communities. Through its affective power and historical resonance, Red Ants contributes to a burning cultural discourse on spatial justice, collective memory and the right to dignified habitation—concerns that remain central to South Africa’s ongoing project of substantive human rights realization. 

Labor rights and gender equality

The struggle for dignity extends beyond housing to the workplace, as powerfully depicted in Asanda Kupa’s Women in Blue Overalls (2017). Through energetic brushwork and a sea of abstracted blue figures, Kupa draws critical attention to the often-marginalized female labour force that sustains South African industries yet remains largely invisible in national economic narratives.

Born in the Eastern Cape—a region that has historically functioned as a primary workforce reservoir for the mining industry—Kupa’s artistic practice is profoundly informed by labour struggles and entrenched power dynamics in post-apartheid South Africa. The blue overalls in this monumental work operate as both signifier and erasure, simultaneously marking the labourers as essential to economic production while rendering them anonymous within the capitalist system. The deliberate anonymity of the female figures in Kupa’s painting emphasizes the deep-rooted invisibility that women continue to experience in labour contexts, particularly in traditionally male-dominated sectors such as mining, where their contributions remain inadequately recognized and compensated.

By specifically focusing on women workers, Kupa stresses the critical intersection of labour rights and gender equality as intertwined human rights concerns. Women continue to face systematic discrimination in the workplace, evidenced by persistent wage disparities and disproportionate representation in undervalued and precarious sectors of the economy. The collective portrayal of these women articulates the potential power of solidarity in the ongoing struggle for economic justice and gender parity in South Africa’s labour landscape.

As Goldblatt notes, “…the majority of the world’s women are excluded from the paid labour market. Rapid urbanisation and globalisation is, however, seeing larger numbers of women enter the labour force, although they continue to be paid less than men. Feminists have noted that the ‘feminisation’ of the labour force, a result of globalisation’s demand for cheap labour, has led to informalisation of work which is less remunerative and offers workers less social protection. Precarious work deepens women’s vulnerability and social exclusion as part of the global poor.” (Goldblatt 2016: 32–33).

Kupa’s Women in Blue Overalls thus constitutes a significant intervention in contemporary discourse on labour rights and gender equality in South Africa. Through his distinctive artistic approach—characterized by dynamic brushwork and compressed pictorial space—Kupa renders visible what is systematically rendered invisible by economic structures. The work challenges viewers to recognize the continued gender-based stratification of labour markets despite constitutional guarantees of equality. By positioning women workers as the central subject on his canvas, Kupa disrupts conventional representations of labour that have historically privileged male workers, particularly in industrial contexts. The painting thus functions as both documentation of present inequities and aspiration toward a more just economic order,where women’s labour is fully recognized, valued and protected. In this way, Kupa’s work exemplifies how contemporary South African art can function not merely as aesthetic production but as critical engagement with ongoing human rights struggles and their complex intersections with gender, class and historical legacies of inequality.

Gender-based violence and the right to safety

Perhaps the most profound human rights challenge addressed in this article is gender-based violence, confronted directly in Lebo Thoka’s powerful photograph Karabo Mokoena (2016). The work is titled in memory of Karabo Mokoena, a young woman who fell victim to femicide when her life was brutally taken by her intimate partner, who subsequently immolated her remains and deposited them in a shallow grave concealed beneath black refuse bags. Through this poignant photographic reimagining, Thoka reconfigures the victim as a contemporary Black Madonna, enshrouded in black against a sombre background, adorned with a deep crimson halo and ceremonial white facial markings, while holding unlit matches in her hand—a potent metaphor for her extinguished potential.

By resorting to religious iconography, Thoka elevates Mokoena’s memory beyond mere victimhood and demands recognition of the humanity that was violently negated by her perpetrator. The stark visual contrasts and dignified portrayal constitute a powerful assertion regarding the sanctity of women’s lives in a societal context, where gender-based violence persists as an endemic condition. Despite South Africa’s Constitution ostensibly guaranteeing equality and freedom for women, these ideals remain unrealized in practice. As Thoka incisively remarks, “The South African justice system does not prioritise the protection of women because it is necessary, but only when it is beneficial to do so. Patriarchy is the puppeteer and women are its puppets.”

Thoka’s work functions simultaneously as memorial and protest, thus compelling viewers to confront the reality where women’s fundamental human rights to safety, bodily autonomy and dignity continue to be systematically violated in South Africa’s post-apartheid democracy. Through this framework, Thoka’s photographic memorial participates in an acute discussion of gender-based violence while insisting on the restoration of dignity to those whose humanity has been violently denied.

Conclusion: Art as witness, memorial, and catalyst

The works examined in this article—Khumalo’s meditation on forced removals, Kupa’s visualization of women’s labour struggles and Thoka’s powerful commemoration of femicide victims—collectively demonstrate the critical role of visual art in South Africa’s ongoing human rights discourse. Through diverse media and methodological approaches, these artists transform abstract constitutional principles into visceral, affective encounters that demand engagement with the lived realities of rights violations in contemporary South Africa.

As we have seen, these artworks function across multiple registers simultaneously—as historical documentation, as memorial practices, as political critique and as imaginative propositions toward more just futures. By visualizing the continued struggles for housing rights, labour equality and freedom from gender-based violence, these artists expose the distance between constitutional aspirations and material realities in our post-apartheid country. Their works challenge viewers to face persistent inequalities that are often concealed within dominant national narratives of transformation and reconciliation.

The ArtbankSA’s acquisition and circulation of these works represents a significant institutional intervention in itself. By collecting and exhibiting artworks that engage directly with human rights challenges, ArtbankSA extends its mandate beyond mere aesthetic considerations to embrace art’s capacity for civic engagement and social critique. This curatorial approach acknowledges the role of cultural production in maintaining critical dialogues around human rights—dialogues that remain essential to the project of substantive democratization.

As South Africa continues to navigate the complex terrain between constitutional ideals and lived experiences, these visual testimonies offer decisive perspectives that complement and sometimes challenge legal and political discourses. Such artworks remind us that human rights are not abstract principles but embodied experiences shaped by historical legacies and contemporary power relations.

The power of these works lies not merely in their documentation of rights violations, but in their capacity to foster empathetic engagement and to imagine alternative possibilities. Through their aesthetic interventions, Khumalo, Kupa and Thoka invite public to move beyond passive consumption toward active witnessing and solidarity. In this way, the ArtbankSA collection demonstrates how contemporary art can serve not only as witness and memorial to ongoing struggles, but also as catalyst for renewed commitment to the unfinished project of realizing human rights for all South Africans.

References

Field, S. 2012. Oral history, community, and displacement: Imagining memories in post-apartheid South Africa. Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.perlego.com/book/3501924 (accessed 20.03.2025)

Goldblatt, B. 2016. Developing the right to social security – A gender perspective. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315651880

Okem, A.E., Myeni, S.L., Mtapuri, O. & Nkambule, S. 2019. A historicity of housing policies in apartheid South Africa. In: Myeni, S.L. & Okem, A.E. (Eds), The political economy of government subsidised housing in South Africa. Routledge. https://www.perlego.com/book/1376807 (accessed 20.03.2025)