Santu Mofokeng

A Taste For Life', Baragwanath Terminus, Diepkloof

Since the global capital expansion, billboards have been the medium of communication between the rulers and the residents of townships. In South Africa, a billboard is a relic from the times when Africans were subjects of power and when townships were restricted areas, subject to laws, municipality by-laws, and ordinances regulated the movement of persons and governed who may or may not enter the township. Santu Mofokeng references this medium for control through tracing the history of townships in South Africa. A Taste For Life, Baragwanath Terminus, Diepkloof captures the ruinous landscape surrounding the social, economic, and political power of alcohol companies represented in the billboard.

Referencing the history of billboards in South Africa — the economic boom of the sixties introduced American style highway advertising billboards that rendered Apartheid ideology anonymous and opaque, the politically turbulent period of the 1970s and 1980s that saw a resurgence of billboards and the recent liberalization of politics with the billboard used to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic — A Taste For Life, Baragwanath Terminus, Diepkloof is a legible palimpsest for reading consumerism, the selling of an unachievable beauty, and cultural fear in Soweto. Mofokeng explores how freedom of speech and cultural sensibility is assaulted by textual and visual bombardment in billboards.