Cosatu in a different light

Unique exhibition is a political commentary on union federation's influence, writes Robyn Sassen

It's not every day that an art exhibition is about trade unions, but Simon Gush has chosen to focus on the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in his ninth solo show, which opened this week.

"This country was a shambles from service delivery strikes when I returned a year ago," says Gush, 30, speaking of his two-year Belgian residency as a laureate of the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten.

Comprising film installations and murals, Gush's show at Johannesburg's Stevenson Gallery was a year in the making.

"Although not a homogeneous organisation, Cosatu is the most important political organ in this country. It is not an explicitly political party, but its mandate is to its membership, and trade unions must be political by nature," says Gush. "Their responsibility to the people interests me. The strikes are more power plays with government than about real issues. They are not about employment or sustainability, the things that matter.

"My work has always spoken of politics," adds this University of the Witwatersrand graduate, now a fellow at the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts attached to the University of Cape Town. "I think art can play a role in discursive politics."

Gush was instrumental, in 2006, in the SaArtsEmerging initiative with Nathaniel Stern and Bronwyn Lace, "a free South African alternative to gallery-driven platforms in this country", and the Parking Gallery, a mobile gallery developed in the storeroom of a garage in the city, based on "low-budget, open-door and temporary manifestation".

Too young to have been in the army and a small child when Cosatu was formed in 1985, he says: "Growing up in KwaZulu-Natal in the 1980s, I was always conscious of politics. I felt the burden of being able to have opinions about the political status quo, particularly as an artist. When I was a child, the effects of the violence in the country were very visible to me. I could only process what it meant by the time I was 18.

"Being in Belgium was good for me. The time and space away set my relationship with SA into relief. It enabled me to step back and look at it anew. My work has always been about my immediate environment."

Representation is not a conventional art show. It involves collaboration with actor and videographer James Cairns; a round-table discussion with London-based Léa Lagasse and local activist artist Dorothee Kreutzfeldt on October 15 at noon; and painted murals in the streets of Braamfontein.

"In any exhibition, you have to respond to the space of the gallery," says Gush. "Space gives art its personality. Stevenson Gallery is near Cosatu House and the labour courts. In the gallery, my exhibition will seem bare: my murals make my art visible from the outside. I like the idea of art spilling onto the streets, where the people are."