Clive van den Berg / New Work / 2008
Clive van den Berg has forged a distinguished career as an artist, curator, designer, lecturer and cultural activist. He is known as much for his intelligence and lively wit as he is for his extraordinary craftsmanship in painting, sculpture, printmaking and in film. Most recently he was Curator of Spier Contemporary (2007) and is currently the Curator/Designer of The Workers Museum, Newtown, Johannesburg and of several public projects in Sharpeville, Soweto and at Freedom Park, Pretoria. Van den Berg is represented in major public collections including Iziko South African National Gallery.
Visual and verbal languages with which to explore the possibilities of being other are central to Van den Berg’s work. His current exhibition departs from convention, challenges assumptions about media, expresses concerns about the state of art and of nation and explores anxieties about the fate of a ravaged planet. But Van den Berg’s strength lies, above all, in his assertions of the possibilities of being otherwise in order to make opportunities for transformation without forgetfulness.
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About
Clive van den Berg
Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) is an artist, curator and designer, who works on his own and in collaboration with colleagues in a collective called trace, whose primary activities are the development of public projects. He has had several solo exhibitions in South Africa, and his work is regularly exhibited abroad. His public projects have included the artworks for landmark Northern Cape Legislature and, since he has joined the trace team, museum projects for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Constitution Hill, Freedom Park, the Workers Museum, The Holocaust and Genocide Centre and many other projects.
Van den Berg has much experience working on large-scale institutional projects with teams representing diverse constituencies: urban planners and policy makers, architects, landscape designers, museum curators, historians, community liaison officials and representatives of local and national governments. In the Northern Cape, for example, where he worked with the Luis Ferreira da Silva architects, he pioneered a new strategy for integrating forms of the local landscape and indigenous aesthetics into the overall building design, while also training local artisans as part of a skills transference project aimed at long-term sustainability. The result is a world-renowned and uniquely South African state edifice: a monument to the people of the Northern Cape.
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