Below the Surface: Swimming Pools as Sites of Memory in Post-Apartheid South African Art

The private swimming pool is an iconic part of the South African suburban landscape, sustained by dark legacies of migrant and domestic labour and ecologically unsustainable practices as much as by climate and lifestyle. It is also a powerful signifier of the shifting neuroses of its privileged, predominantly white, middle-class resident bathers. This article argues that, in representing the private swimming pool, contemporary South African artists interrogate issues “below the surface” of unresolved historical trauma and create a space for often reparative memory work. Works by Kirsten Beets, Lungiswa Gqunta, and Berni Searle are examined in painting, video, and installation; works examined have all been produced against the backdrop of Cape Town’s severe drought of 2015– 2018. Avoiding a habitualised instrumentalisation of water, the article thinks with water firstly as memory and secondly as a container for a traumatised South African consciousness, grappling critically with issues of acculturated whiteness and notions of privilege, leisure, and recreation in the time of climate crisis. This is done by interpreting works by the selected artists, bringing into focus how water itself, while “captured” in the swimming pool, is nonetheless acting through the works and this article to shape an imaginary of watery spaces alongside and through the sociopolitical. Watery spaces are also argued as existing even in the absence of water.