Notes

‘This work is from a series of eight panels made at the height of the second State of Emergency, decrying difficult living conditions in Alexandra township, whilst the artist was working for the ANC aligned organisation Fund for a Free South Africa. The artist saw it as her role to bear witness to atrocities committed by the apartheid state. Berman was involved in smuggling banned images from the Afrapix photographic collective in South Africa to the anti-apartheid movement in exile, which inspired her own art-making. The images in Alex under Siege were inspired by documentary photographs taken in the 1980s by Peter Magubane, Alf Khumalo, Omar Badsha, Gideon Mendel and Paul Weinberg, some of whom belonged to the Afrapix photographic collective. Imprints of the full series are in the Constitutional Court Art Collection.’¹

1. Constitutional Court Art Collection (n.d.) ‘Kim Berman: Alex under Siege 1-8, 1986’, https://ccac.concourttrust. org.za/works/kim-berman-alex-undersiege- 1-8-1986