‘It’s gone home for a family dinner’: Vivienne Koorland on the shifting contexts of her paintings

Vivienne Koorland is one of the most important South African artists working today. Her monumental paintings are built of rough, raw materials. Koorland’s detailed – and often huge – works are responses to war, migration and colonisation – both personal and addressing a global condition.

Professor Tamar Garb is the Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London. She has published widely on questions of gender and sexuality in Modern and Contemporary Art as well as on photography from Africa, the work of women artists and feminist aesthetics. She published William Kentridge Vivienne Koorland, Conversations in Letters and Lines in 2016. 

Vivienne Koorland’s works VIVE MAMAN, 1987, and War Drawing Eva: Seder II, 1992 on display in Living by the Rule: Contemporary meets Medieval. We joined the two friends in conversation at the Sainsbury Centre, reflecting on the works and this exhibition.

Vivienne Koorland said of the painting: “My painting VIVE MAMAN (1987) isn’t supposed to teach you anything. But it was painted forty years ago with a specific message, specifically addressing what the Germans now call Zivilisationsbruch – as if imperialism colonialism and slavery weren’t enough – and over the last four decades this message hasn’t changed for me.

“So if I say anything at all, now, any one thing about my VIVE MAMAN all these years later, about this painting I made in 1987 in the wake of France’s first ever trial of crimes against humanity, then let it be this…

“Focus on the voice in the form of Jacques’ titled drawing which I superimposed in vine black oil paint with my fingers, my hands, on the ‘ground’ (as it were) of history and rule-based tradition. Focus on this child’s voice that claims JUSTICE OVER ANNIHILATION, in this genocidal world of ours.