Art against Apartheid’s Two-Year Tour in Japan – Past Disquiet Redux (Part III)

Inspired by the MIRSA initiative, Ernest Pignon-Ernest and Spanish artist Antonio Saura (who was exiled to Paris because of the Franco dictatorship in Spain) proposed to establish a museum-in-exile in the form of an itinerant exhibition of artworks incarnating international artists’ denunciation of the apartheid regime in South Africa. They established the Artists of the World against Apartheid Committee to oversee the collection of artworks and tour of the exhibition. With the help of French sculptor Arman, who lived in New York in the 1980s, approximately 100 works by 96 internationally acclaimed artists and writers were assembled.

Art Contre/Against Apartheid was exhibited in Paris in 1983 and travelled to Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany, Finland, Greece, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Italy, Japan, Martinique, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as several other countries.

In our research, we focused on the story of the collection’s tour in Japan, in part because it is at once unusual and exemplary. In 1987, Maeda Rei, a Japanese sociology student, returned to Japan after a visit to Paris, where she had attended the UNESCO-organised International Conference Against Apartheid and learned about the Art Contre/Against Apartheid touring exhibition. She was determined to bring the collection to Japan and showed the catalogue to Fram Kitagawa, a publisher who became impassioned to edit a Japanese version of the texts and tour the exhibition throughout Japan. They negotiated with the Artists of the World against Apartheid association in Paris and obtained authorisation for a two-year-long Japanese tour, which was to be handled by non-professionals and displayed in as many towns as possible, in non-museum spaces such as gymnasiums and community centres. 

Kitagawa and Maeda devised a system whereby the exhibition could be hosted for as short a time as a single day and for as long as a week. To that end, a climate-controlled ‘moving-storage’ truck was custom designed by PH Studio, a group of artists and architects who worked with artist Kawamata Tadashi and architect Hiroshi Hara. The truck was named ‘Julia Pempel’, referencing a character in a poem by Miyazawa Kenji. The exhibition’s Japanese title Apartheid Non! International Art Festival was shortened to Apa Non. On top of the truck, a huge red balloon was fastened to attract the attention of the local people. 

The Apa Non tour started in Okinawa, in the very south of Japan, and was exhibited for 500 days at 194 venues to 380,000 visitors. The final stop was at the Parliamentary Museum in Tokyo, with political officials in attendance, including Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu. 

The collection was shipped to Korea after Japan – as per the Japanese organisers’ intentions – where it was exhibited in Seoul. South Korea was then under military dictatorship, and the exhibition was subjected to vigorous censorship.

After the collapse of the apartheid regime, the collection was donated to the government of South Africa and was exhibited in the Houses of Parliament in Cape Town for the nation’s first democratically elected legislators. The collection was placed in the custody of the Mayibuye Centre at the University of the Western Cape, which also safeguards one of the largest archives of liberation struggle materials in South Africa.