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The ability of information, knowledge, and culture to move rapidly through time and space has been revolutionised by technology. Each progression in image production and distribution has changed every aspect of visual and material culture – has, in short, transformed the ways that we engage with the world around us. Theodor Adorno warned that television’s omnipresence and its ability to simulate and mould reality would be instrumentalised to reinforce the dominant culture amongst a passive audience. In his essay,
“How to Look at Television” (1954), he wrote:
By exposing the socio-psychological implications and mechanisms of television, which often operate under the guise of false realism, not only may the shows be improved, but, more important possibly, the public at large may be sensitised to the nefarious effect of some of these mechanisms.
A wide array of artists has taken on the mantle of problematising what is proposed to us as reality within mass media, using mass media’s tools to do so. This essay follows one of many paths through the history of multimedia art in South Africa, focusing on the moving image and ‘Net Art’.
Television and Video Art
Though it was invented in the 1920s and saw widespread adoption in households around the world by the end of the 1950s, broadcast television only came to South Africa in 1976. On the other end of the political spectrum from Adorno, the Afrikaner nationalist government – in particular, Albert Hertzog, Minister of Posts and Telegraphs – feared the propagandic power of television, because their own propaganda might not have been able to compete with it. Given the dominance of English-language programming (and the complete lack of high production value shows in Afrikaans), they believed that television would allow the importation of immoral, ‘communist’, and anti-segregationist ideas from the US and the UK, threatening the stability and survival of the apartheid system. Though film-making and -watching had long been present in South African movie theatres, the unspectacular everydayness of television was not a part of the visual culture.
Before South Africans even gained access to television, artists elsewhere (particularly in the West) were already making it their duty to explore and deconstruct television’s hegemonic power. Nam June Paik had already produced one of his most famous works, TV Buddha (1976), in which a sculpture of Buddha ‘watches’ on a television screen a live image of itself transmitted by CCTV, literally confronting religion with mass media. Martha Rosler had parodied the format of the cooking show as a form of feminist critique in her work, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). Vito Acconci heightened the relationship between the viewer and the viewed in a recorded performance in which he lies in bed with a camera, begging and cajoling his virtual audience to switch places with him in Command Performance (1974).
Video art only really began to have a presence in the South African art world in the 1990s. In 1989, William Kentridge began his series, 9 Drawings for Projection.
During the Johannesburg Biennale, Tracey Rose exhibited/performed Span II (1997), in which she sat nude on a television – screening close-up recordings of her body – as she knotted her shaven hair into yarn, speaking back to images of women of colour in art and visual culture. Minnette Vari more directly engaged with television and video game culture with works that include Vex Quest (1998) and Alien (1999), which she has contextualised in her own words:
How can one not be tempted to divine one’s own destiny from the televisual tarot of global media? There were times when, told in the language of international news, the histories of my country would unfold in unrecognisable ways, and my place within these stories would become disjointed and unbearable. I wanted to speak of the discomfort of a thousand ill-fitting interpretations. Using television images relating to the transformative events between 1994 and 1998, I attempted to locate my own implicit presence in the narrative of these critical times.
In line with this excerpt from Vari, each of these artists’ experiments with the moving image added granularity to the world’s conceptions of South Africa in the moment immediately after apartheid, when people were interested in understanding this place.
The Internet and Net Art.
Unlike television, South Africa was quick to gain access to the internet – though the depth of access continues to be modulated by economic inequality (linked to racial inequality). However, this lack has increasingly been mitigated by broader access to smartphones. Terry Kurgan’s multidisciplinary project, Hotel Yeoville (2008–2012), engaged with the realities of unequal access to the internet and the parallel lack of visibility of some people’s stories. After the ‘white flight’ from Johannesburg’s city centre in the 1990s and increased neglect by commerce and the state, Yeoville became home to Pan-African communities of recent immigrants from all over the African continent. Kurgan’s project was participatory and installation-based. Alongside a team of “artists, architects, social scientists, urban planners, Yeoville residents, community activists, businesspeople and digital designers”, Kurgan used the then-ubiquitous form of the internet cafe to prompt members of the community to share their experiences. The installation included “a journey booth, which allowed visitors to share via Google Maps why and how they came to Yeoville; a photo booth (and accompanying photo wall); a video booth; a business booth; and a story booth,” using computers, camera equipment, and social media platforms like YouTube, all set in a newly refurbished public library.
Continuing with the theme of access, I recently came across a 2002 work by Tino Sehgal (an artist of German and Indian descent), titled This is Propaganda. In this performance, the viewer enters the gallery, and, in response, a performer dressed as a museum guard turns away from the visitor and sings, “This is propaganda, you know, you know; this is propaganda.” Though I have not seen it in person, what is particularly notable about this work is the conditions attached to it. On the website of the Tate Museum (which acquired the work in 2005), they note that a “conceptual requirement” of the work is that it must not be documented in wall labels, photographs, films, or written contracts. The work must be experienced in person. While this gesture is poetic and prescient of the current moment in which we have become increasingly concerned with the instability and the lack of engagement with ‘the real’, I was also struck by the contradiction that inheres in it. Like me, many of the people who know of this work have never seen it in person. Almost all of my knowledge of art in the Western canon has been mediated by a computer screen, and this is broadly true for students and professionals in the art world who do not live in ‘art world centres’ or in cities with well-funded museums with adequate infrastructure to secure loans of significant artworks. The internet has allowed us to see ideas and artworks in a space untouched by the opinions of university librarians, lecturers, or local curators.
For a person living away from the ‘centre’, this experience of looking at art online is very familiar. It is a much greater surprise to see works of art by someone who grew up in a similar context to you, watched the same TV shows you did, and who spent as much time navigating the internet in the way that you did. Looking back at my first published essay,, which also happened to be on Net Art, I better understand why my language was so effusive (besides youth being a factor – I wrote it at the beginning of my career). The essay was written on the artists who formed NTU Collective (Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Tabita Rezaire, and Nolan Oswald Dennis) and CUSS Group (Ravi Govender, Mpumelelo Jamal Nxedlana, Lex Trickett, and Zamani Xolo). I was excited by the idea that local artists were engaging so directly with the internet as a tool, but I was also excited about the rare experience of seeing works that resonated with my frames of reference. Bogosi Sekhukhuni’s work is particularly evocative, showing melting, dissolving video extracts from Jam Alley, a music variety show produced by the South African Broadcasting Corporation in the 1990s, and the iconic moment in 1995 when Nelson Mandela held the trophy after South Africa won their first Rugby World Cup following the end of apartheid. These images symbolise the ‘Rainbow Nation’ narrative, which has since become either nostalgic or frustrating, depending on who you ask.
The feeling of being at home on the internet, surrounded by culture that is hyper-globalised but also hyper-niche, is elaborated upon in Natalie Paneng’s practice. She often depicts herself as existing in void-like spaces that vibrate with the image culture of early Web 2.0. Unlike the standardised interfaces of most of the websites and social media platforms we currently navigate daily, this aesthetic allows for jarring expressions of cuteness and kitschiness that I associate with MySpace and Tumblr. These are websites that rely upon customisability, like decorating the walls of a childhood bedroom. This capacity to make a home in the virtual world is present in Paneng’s work, but it exists in tension with the specificity of growing up in South Africa. In a video titled E Monaganong (2023), she emphasises the void with a checkered floor that seems to go on forever, and windows that open onto blackness. Her voice echoes as she sings the Setswana version of the childhood song used to learn the names of body parts: “Tlhogo, mahetla, nko le molomo…”. In an artist statement about this work, she described it as an exploration of her identity after waves of “‘private-schoolisation’, ‘internetisation’ and globalisation.”
There is an increasingly vibrant game development industry in South Africa, and video games are an art unto themselves. I am interested in the way that Mitchell Gilbert Messina is able to use the capabilities of computers to make a game out of contemporary art. One of his earliest works, fittingly titled My First Game (2015), is an absurd play on the many, very popular sports-themed video games. The viewer/player’s avatar is a basketball, bouncing around an exhibition at Stevenson’s Cape Town gallery. There is no winning or losing beyond attempting to see as much of the art as possible while ricocheting off the walls – and sometimes off the works themselves. Though the works cannot be fully expressed as rendered pixels on a screen, the lack of preciousness enabled by their reproduction is humorous and engaging. More recently, Messina has been exploring the surface of artworks as dynamic interfaces. Many of his experiments are unexhibited and unresolved (to him) but fascinating. Yet his exhibition, Bouncing Ball (2025), at Break Room, a project space run from Igshaan Adams’ studio, allows viewers to experience one of his many technical but simple (at least, in principle) solutions to curatorial and artistic problems. Borrowing from the old-fashioned style of billboards with rotating panels that swap between multiple advertisements, he produced a dynamic painting of a ball bouncing through space, a literal moving image, imbuing the painting with some of the qualities of a screen. It is a physical response to the virtual world.
Conclusion:
Though video and net art are difficult to sell anywhere in the world, the challenges are greater here than in the West. South Africa has the privilege of an arts ecology with commercially viable galleries and a market of art collectors, but publicly funded, non-profit institutions willing to support ‘unconventional’ art forms are rare. Perhaps Messina’s Bouncing Ball is also a response to the limitations of South Africa’s art world, a way of responding to the market’s demands by saying, ‘Fine, I’ll give you a painting,’ and then filling it up with electrical wires and Arduinos. That would fit the self-reflexive humour of his work. It is noteworthy that I cannot think of a single artist in this ecosystem who is able to support themselves solely through a multimedia-based artistic practice. Beyond the South African context, as developments in technology gain speed and complexity, I return to Adorno’s quote at the opening of this essay. There is a danger in passively consuming manufactured content without any mechanism that enables a diversity of responses. As software companies become more monopolistic and secretive, I wonder about the continued ability of artists to speak back to the dominant narrative in impactful ways.
