Written by Dr. Marlise Richter, Senior Researcher, University of Cape Town.
At the end of April, the Global Health Solidarity Project hosted its third bi-monthly webinar entitled "Artistic and Activist Understandings of Solidarity During Times of Trouble." It invited three South African activist/artists to share their reflections on solidarity within their fields of practice.
One of the speakers, artist and activist Haroon Gunn-Salie, spoke about his collaborations with the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (the Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town. He was part of a Zeitz MOCAA convening of artists during the Covid pandemic called the Radical Solidarity Summit (2020), and his exhibition entitled Line in the Sand highlighted contemporary inequalities, and explicit and hidden injustices within South African society.
He described the installation “No Sugar” in this exhibition, which consisted of eight coffee mugs on a shelf. He had originally come across the crockery while having a coffee break with cleaning and security staff in the Zeitz MOCAA basement. During the coffee break, he noted to the others that all the mugs they were using were chipped. They said that they generally inherit the broken mugs from staff members higher up in the museum’s hierarchy – thus, functional but broken ‘hand-me-downs’. Gunn-Salie noted: “I said that's a problem, that's quite Rhodesian and I walked down to Woolies [an upmarket department store] and replaced the eight chipped cups with the new cups that now no longer can go upstairs. The Woolies cups stay with the workers in the basement. These (chipped) cups are now up on the wall, called No Sugar.”
An exhibition of damaged commonplace mugs and his sense-making were evocative to me. I am aware that chipped mugs are generally serviceable – they do the job of keeping one’s tea warm. But I find myself reticent to drink from a disfigured mug – I have a visceral feeling of distaste. Something is off-centre and my tea is less comforting. In an art museum which pays heightened attention to aesthetics, to symbolism, and to function and form, the presence of ugly mugs is jarring. The installation is more striking as the mugs are meant to remain “hidden” in the basement but have been “excavated” and brought up to the sharp light of the main exhibition space. This basement is also home to other things hidden from the public eye; the people who clean the museum and keep it sanitised, safe and beautiful for outside visitors and for staff to enjoy and to reflect.
Gunn-Salie seeks out this discomfort and he trusts that his audience will be able to confront what Arthur Kleinman calls the “violences of everyday life”, without retaliation. Gunn-Salie thus skilfully employs his role as artist-activist to stand in solidarity with those at the bottom of the museum hierarchy, and to pose questions about why there is “no sugar” for those who must drink from ugly mugs.
This imagery and message are striking, and I won’t be able to look at a chipped mug in the future without considering what power relations and hierarchy might have brought it to a particular shelf. And what solidarity it demands of me; to call out uncomfortable and subtle everyday violences if needed.