Notes

Mango Groove, the Afropop sensation, dropped their third studio album, Another Country, in 1993, only months before the country’s landmark democratic elections. The eponymous single, infused with a powerful sense of optimism for the country’s democratic future, became the anthem of South Africa’s joyful crossover period. Memorably, the accompanying music video was directed and created by William Kentridge, and made in his stop-motion animation style that had already caught the attention of major international curators, institutions and collectors. Video of Claire Johnston, the band’s vocalist, was inserted into the charcoal-drawn narrative that moved between evocative mine-dump landscapes, banner-carrying crowds, towering pylons, wrapped monuments and booming megaphones. Poignant images of a violent past flashed across billboards and drive-in screens, but clear starry skies and cleansing rains promised clarity and renewal. Many of Another Country’s scenes recall the artist’s earlier watershed films Monument (1990) and Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old (1991). The present lot shows a jostling mass of figures surrounding a megaphone-topped pylon, with banners in Kentridge’s familiar colours of red and blue a shock beneath the grey sky. Often seen as a symbol of authoritarian control, this megaphone tower crumbles to dust in the final frame of the video.