Beyond The Echo Chamber

Hide, Brett Murray’s long-awaited show at Everard Read, turned its satirical head to look beyond the mire of state politics and toward the chatter of the Twitterverse

- Ferial Haffajee

Although I’ve never met him, I feel close to Brett Murray. His work is always an evocation of the present and future; a prescient commentary on the beloved country.

But it’s not only for that reason. In 2012, he and I and City Press, the newspaper I edited at the time, were umbilically tied. City Press had published a review of Murray’s exhibition, Hail to the Thief, and all hell broke loose. The paper had run an art review of the exhibition and used the image of ‘The Spear’, featuring then-president Jacob Zuma as Vladimir Lenin, but with his penis exposed. It was a local rendition of the story of the naked emperor, and produced as the kleptocracy began to grip South Africa. The country and the governing ANC went berserk as the image was taken out of the gallery and into a mass black newspaper. I thought about Murray a lot this past April

as I reviewed his latest work – at the same time, parts of the ANC threatened to burn copies of journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh’s book, Gangster State, about the party’s secretary general Ace Magashule. The burning was condemned by the ANC high-ups, including its chief whip at parliament, Jackson Mthembu.