Notes

Diane Victor earned her Fine Arts degree in printmaking at Wits University in 1986, and has taught at many tertiary institutions including the Universities of Pretoria, Johannesburg, Wits and Rhodes. Her work is represented in major public collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tatham Art Gallery, Pretoria Art Museum, Wits Art Museum, and Iziko South African National Gallery. Victor’s works are disturbing and provocative, steeped in multiple narratives and, she admits, ‘obsessive detail’.

This iconographically rich print, the middle section of a triptych, published in the Taxi monograph (see p.16–17) on the artist’s work, explores the ‘accidental settler’ as a metaphor for the white occupation of South African land. The naked, ageing, white man, crouched at the centre dominates the image. Behind him a hand draws back a curtain exposing the contested landscape. Fascist symbols (such as the fasces – a bundle of sticks with an axe and the laurel wreath associated with Mussolini) and the burned protea add layers of meaning to the image.

Provenance

Donated by the artist