SA Rocks

Barbara Hogan has been names in the Science and Technology genre of the Time 2009 Top 100. She is the outgoing Minister of Health in South Africa.

Here’s what Hogan’s write-up said:

To understand the dignity and power of Barbara Hogan, one must first have some understanding of what she is made of: profound experience, dedicated service to her homeland, unflinching courage, conviction and compassion.

Hogan, 57, joined the African National Congress (ANC) after the Soweto uprising in 1976, even though the organization had been made illegal. She actively resisted apartheid and organized consumer boycotts, and for this, she served eight years of brutal incarceration in Pretoria Central Prison.

After being released in 1990, she rose through the ranks of the ANC and now has enough power that when President Kgalema Motlanthe appointed her Minister of Health in September 2008, she could engineer a radical change of South Africa’s national AIDS policy.

Hogan’s predecessor recommended garlic and beetroot as treatments for HIV. But Hogan stands up for truth, for what is right and for what must be done. She has acknowledged that HIV causes AIDS and has embraced antiretroviral drugs. She has pledged that pregnant mothers with the virus will be treated with nevirapine to stop transmission at birth — ending a policy of denial that was responsible for the loss of an estimated 330,000 lives. Not bad for less than one year in office.

From Time directly.

While William Kentridge is hands down my favourite South African artist, I am seemingly not alone here. I would almost literally kill to get my hands on his artwork. I can’t because I am not a millionaire sadly. It excites me to see a living South African artist being recognised by an international community for his work.

Kentridge has been selected in the Artists & Entertainers genre of the Time 2009 Top 100.

This is what Kentridge’s write-up had to say:

I have often wondered: If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the price of a song? What could an essay be that is about the multiple emotions, feelings, moods and starlight of the startlingly original drawings by the South African artist William Kentridge, 54? These lives erupting through the line and the page with their features telling thousands of mutating stories.

Kentridge has stated that he came to terms with the fact (often so hard to accept) that the images — states of mind — of these interior reflections are personal to the artist, who must accept that he is putting the deepest part of his soul and mind in his work and then showing it to the world. This is something that makes interviews and journalistic adventures a misery, as the conversation will always turn to the question “Why are you showing us this?” It does not seem enough to answer: I do this to reveal beauty and humanity in all its guises. We are one and similar in all respects.

We look at Kentridge’s Preparing the Flute (an installation tied to his staging of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute) and see charcoal, pastel and colored pencil with a model theater and animation — all tools brought to bear. And still I sit in awe of his study of the artist space Artist and Model from the series Pit. The drawings of his film Stereoscope. The ability to express that for which there may be no word. An original expression of the most inexpressible. Kentridge has made a home for emotions in his private expression, through line and form, of that which we cannot say.

From Time directly.

This was my first introduction to William Kentridge’s work. I then proceeded to study Kentridge as my artist of choice at school level.

Some more of his incredible videos and some work.

Hat tip to Southafrica.info for the heads up.

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