Hands Up: Art about our race

American conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas draws on a wealth of historical material to fashion History Doesn't Laugh.

His show is preoccupied with the representation of - and the conflict around - race in South Africa's recent past.

But Thomas is not merely interested in reproducing this material in a gallery setting. He uses various techniques to convey new meaning and introduce an unsettling immediacy.

This is perhaps most evident in his series of sculptures in aluminium, copper and bronze which are 3-D representations of the hands that have appeared in photographs from the apartheid era.

In A Luta Continua, the hands of arrested protesters jut out of the metal windows of a police van, for example. Liberated from the greyscale flatness of the photograph, they assert a powerful humanness impossible to ignore.

Thomas's interest in how consumerism seeks to define identity is manifested in enlarged, screen-printed old magazine adverts selling everything from stretch mark cream to self-defence tools, leaving it up to the viewer to decode what these adverts say.

Freedom in our lifetime, a wall painted in Ndebele patterns and topped by security wire, offers a powerful reminder not only of how far we've come in overcoming division and prejudice, but also how much further we have to go.

Thomas does not provide us with any easy answers. This show is a powerful - and sometimes painful - acknowledgement that history isn't simply black and white.

• 'History Doesn't Laugh' is at the Goodman Gallery Cape Town until June 28