Speaking in stitch: the Keiskamma Altarpiece as testimony to women’s experience of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Black women in South Africa (SA) face multiple and interlocking systems of oppression every-day; among them gender-based violence, economic marginalization, and the legacy of racialized and gendered subjugation under centuries of colonization, followed by the apartheid regime. On the heels of South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, the HIV/AIDS pandemic quickly overwhelmed health and social support systems, resulting in the highest AIDS incidence in the world, to this day. This article engages with a monumental artwork called the Keiskamma Altarpiece, which was created by a group of (mainly) women in a rural area of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. I “read” the Altarpiece as testimony and storytelling against the shaming and silencing of women’s lives and experiences in South Africa, and argue that it calls us to become response-able to its witness. Using discourse and esthetic analysis, informed by post-colonial memory studies, I argue for better memory practices and increased awareness of the legacies of disease, and engage with Roger Simon’s concept of remembering otherwise.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the support of a Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship while writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The Keiskamma Art Project take its name from the Keiskamma River, which runs alongside the villages where the majority of the women who work at the Art Project live.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annette Wentworth

Annette Wentworth is an essayist and PhD student at the University of Alberta. She has been involved in community arts and HIV/AIDS projects in South Africa since 2008. Her research areas are gender and memory, witnessing and remembrance practices, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa. Other areas of interest are arts-based research, anti-racist and anti/decolonizing research and practice.