Andries Botha & Charl Blignaut on Arts Censorship

Andries Botha & Charl Blignaut on Arts Censorship

Charl Blignaut and Andries Botha will address the issues around Arts Censorship in South Africa and the various guises that such censorship takes. A large focus of the talk will center around Andries Botha’s controversial elephant sculptures.

Charl Blignaut

Charl Blignaut is a senior reporter at City Press, tracking culture news, features and investigations. In his first month back at newspapers – after a 10-year spell writing and producing television drama – he previewed an art exhibition at the Goodman Gallery. It was a Brett Murray solo featuring The Spear. An all-too familiar storm broke around City Press.

Andries Botha

Andries Botha is an internationally renowned sculptor and human rights activist. His art is concerned with power, western value systems, colonialism, apartheid, ethnicity, global conflict, economic migration, philosophy, and mythology. In the early nineties, Botha served in the new democratic government of South Africa as National Visual Arts Chairperson, with a mandate to co-ordinate a visual arts report on the state and vision of creativity, which informed the creation of a national cultural policy for the arts. He recently successfully challenged the Ethekwini Municipality over the so-called “Elephant Saga” in Durban. Botha’s matriarchal elephant sculpture, Nomkhubulwane, can be seen daily at the Village Green, together with an exhibition showcasing the creation of these life-size sculptures.