Kim Berman

Dr Kim Berman lectures at in the Fine Arts department of The University of Johannesburg(UJ) and is the Director of The Artist Proof Studio in Newtown, Johannesburg. Kim Berman received her B.F.A. from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1981 and her M.F.A. in printmaking from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, Mass, USA, in 1989. In 2009 she recieved her doctorate in Fine Arts from UJ. In 1991,together with Nhlanhla Xaba, she founded the Artist Proof Studio, a community printmaking Centre in Newtown (Johannesburg), which provides training and studio facilities to emerging artists.

In 2000 she initiated Phumani Paper, a national poverty relief project funded by the Department of Science and Technology. This is a research and training based project at the Technikon that implements research and technology innovations by graduate students for rural development. Phumani Paper has set up 20 papermaking projects in seven provinces of South Africa.

Kim Berman has lectured and exhibited widely in South Africa, Europe and the United States and is represented in South Africa by the Goodman Gallery, where she has held a number of successful solo exhibitions.

Berman is a hugely energetic person who is deeply committed to political and social transformation in South Africa. She uses printmaking as a vehicle to reflect on the social and political processes that surround her. She has the uncanny ability to take a neglected, peripheral landscape and to transform it into an image that not only comments on society but is also transformed into something beautiful and poignant.

Artists statement:

The Plantation Lithographs are inspired by seemingly unrelated landscape images that I photographed around the time of the xenophobic violence in 2008. In June of the same year, rural areas close to the town of White River in Mpumalanga province were consumed by vast forest fires. It was necessary for farmers to revive their badly damaged exotic fruit orchards by drastically pruning down the trees and painting them white with lime in order to protect the exposed bark from the sun and possible disease. For me the fields of white amputated trees in regimented rows visually enacted the predicament of the alien; the shameful, drastic marking and control of the other. Exploring this imagery through a range of visual art techniques offered me a way of processing and exploring both the fragility of South Africa's democracy, and of integrating and accommodating radical dislocation into a deceptively ordinary landscape.

In my work, landscapes have always provided a metaphor for South Africa's transitions as a country: even in a poisoned, burnt, or smoke-filled landscape, the light on the horizon sparks the energy and hope for the cycle of change and imperative of renewal. Both of these series are set in the winter of 2008: they speak of a stark, sterile, dry, cold, empty, white, regimented aftermath of earlier fire, violence and chaos. But winter is part of a cycle, and its moment does pass.

Kim Berman 2010

Berman has long been concerned with fire and its ability both destroy and create.

Artists statement:

"Through the Wire, Lowveld Fires" I, II, III (triptych)

The three lithographs are based on a series of monotypes and are printed from 8 or 11 colour plates per lithograph, on Rives BFK paper.

"Through the Wire Lowveld Fires" refers back to the series of that I have been working on using fire a smoke on as a metaphor for social change in South Africa. The fire symbolises a process of burning and purging to make way for new growth, while the smoke chokes and suffocates the truth.

The introduction of barbed wire in this series represents a barrier that recalls the symbolic landscape of apartheid. There is a tension between the transparent layering and political deception or betrayal of the broken promises of a "new South Africa".
Kim Berman 2003

Artists

New Editions

Kim Berman Alien Landscapes

Plantations (2010)

Ponds (2005)

Fires (2003)