Print head: Forged in fire / Healing touch of creation
Print blurb: A milestone year for acclaimed artist and activist Kim Berman sees her reflect on ghosts, the gods of fire and finding her way back to the gallery floor. By Ufriedo Ho
Print pull quote: I knew I needed to make the work and it was a very generative, healing and powerful time for me to connect with the process of making again — Kim Berman, Artist and professor
When a gas heater malfunctioned and burst into flames in Kim Berman’s home study this past winter, the artist fought the fire for determined minutes then realised better. She grabbed her laptop in terrified flight, slammed the door on the inferno and fled.
Neighbours rushed over; everyone inside and her dogs were safe. Help arrived in time and firefighters managed to keep the damage contained to the study.
By the early morning though, what was lost to the fire became clear. The Irma Stern charcoal portrait of her grandfather, Richard Feldman, was destroyed. It was a piece, she says, made from intimate friendships and one that reassured her as it hung like a steadfast sentinel in her study.
For years it had hung in her mother Mona’s bedroom before it became hers when her mother passed. Berman’s grandparents were close friends with Stern, recognised as one of South Africa’s most influential and successful artists. Feldman was a founding member of the Labour Party in South Africa, and Berman credits his legacy and writings as what helped ground her and her sisters’ deep sense of defending human rights and social justice as they grew up.
Also lost to the fire were family portraits. These images were bubbled and singed in the frames in which they hung. Books special to her, including ones she made as a paper maker, were reduced to ash. But what would become even clearer for Berman was a revelation of having patience for smoke to clear and trusting that through the haze she would see a different way to hold the things that pass, and the ghosts that linger.
Fire has been a recurring theme in Berman’s work that spans more than 40 years. For Berman, also a professor at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in the visual arts department, fire has raged in her life as lived reality. It’s made the story of the Artist Proof Studio (APS) that she founded in 1991 with fellow artist and teacher Nhlanhla Xaba, one that’s shadowed by constant haunting.
At the tail-end of apartheid Xaba and Berman had a bold, daring vision and a mission to respond to democratising the art space. Berman had spent seven years in Boston in the US as an apprentice of a communal printmaking studio in the 1980s. She was looking to replicate this collaborative, not-for-profit way of working in visual arts in Joburg.
She describes in a paper she wrote in 2018: “In February 1990, on a television screen in Boston, I watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison. I wanted to be part of building a post-apartheid South Africa. I sold my car and possessions, bought a French Tool etching press — the Rolls-Royce of studio presses — and took home my vision to start a [printmaking] studio in South Africa.”
She and Xaba were from worlds kept apart, but they shared values for social change and the belief that art could be a key to unlock empowerment for creatives and be transformative in creating a nonracial society. Buoyed by their idea and their ideals, they opened their doors as Artist Proof Studio in Jeppe Street in a disused Newtown warehouse.
In their hands, printmaking did indeed widen access into the art world. It started with the act of producing multiples of an artwork, challenging the idea of exclusive ownership. APS was also about rebalancing the relationship between printmaker and artist and committing to an ethos of community, co-creation, building up and paying it forward.
They were using art to take a position and to respond to the world’s horrors, injustices and ills — from the Aids crisis in the late 1990s, gender-based violence to racism and xenophobia.
But in 2003 tragedy would strike. A fire broke out in the building one night. The building burnt to the ground and Xaba, asleep in the studio that night, was killed.
The fire consumed so much that was precious to Berman and to the APS community. From those remnants and ashes she’d have to find reasons to carry hurt, but also to carry on. Slowly she set down her grief, traumas and heavy heart into her art and into shaping the distinctive ethos of APS.
Now in 2025, APS is at the milestone moment of looking to 35 years of existence next year. Its innovative model of sponsored tuition through a patron project has seen over 300 students funded to receive access to training, mentoring and personal development. Their art has also found new audiences and interest — essential for artists to make the breakthrough to thrive.
APS counts among its alumni the likes of Mary Sibande, Thabang Lehobye, Phillemon Hlungwane, Nelson Makamo, Blessing Ngobeni and Lebohang Motaung. The studio has also maintained long-standing associations with art luminaries like Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, William Kentridge, Norman Catherine, the late David Koloane and Willem Boshoff.
Berman will be stepping back from APS management as they usher in Nathi Simelane as COO. APS will also be looking for its next premises as its lease agreement at the Isle of Houghton comes to an end.
Even more milestones are converging for Berman. She retires from her lecturing role at UJ at the end of the year. Her long teaching journey with the university, including when it was the Wits Technikon, has spanned 31 years. In early spring, the UJ Gallery hosted Berman’s first solo exhibition in 15 years.
Titled Remembering and Forgetting: Landscapes in Dialogue it featured six overlapping themes of State of Urgency, Sunflowers in Mourning, Fire and Smoke, Mining and Damaged Landscapes, Artists Books, and Fire Revisited.
The works consider the social, political and personal as expressed in the landscapes and scenes Berman depicts. She grapples with the devastation of mining extractivism of ravaged lands, the climate crisis and the people affected.
Her Sunflowers in Mourning series evoke rural women with bowed heads, weeping. But there’s solidarity and resilience in the collective, and Berman notes that the sunflowers droop to drop seeds with the promise of renewal.
In a portrait series from 1999, her “monsters of evil”, works are made with a technique called aquatint as her metaphor for “finding the light from the darkness”. Portrayed as a deck of cards, she zooms in on the faces of the perpetrators of violence and torture, the people who propped up apartheid’s brutal machinery. They remain silent on answering the questions lingering from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1995.
And with the inclusion in the exhibition of an installation retelling the story of the fire in her study, she explores the question of personal loss and surrender to the synchronicities of things not humanely controlled.
Berman’s exhibition also invited “rusted ghosts” into the gallery. She used reclaimed plates — the ghosts — some literally rusted, then re-inked them and used them in new works. It was her way of pulling a thread between the past and the present, and in acknowledging the ghosts that traverse these realms.
Berman’s power is to present paradoxes, devastation, even despair with equal parts meditated intent but also the mercy of a breathing space. In that pause the viewer is afforded an extra moment, one more exhale, to maybe arrive at a different conclusion.
This sensibility and resonance in her work has earned her worldwide acclaim and her art is in collections that span the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington. Back home her works can be found at JAG, WAM and the Constitutional Court.
But even with a career crowned with esteem and renown, Berman is graciously humble as she reflects on self-doubt and losing confidence. It’s what she felt, she says, faced with creating a solo project after a long hiatus this year.
“Anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t work alone,” says Berman who is a teacher, collaborator and facilitator at heart — not solitary roles.
“I hadn’t felt the pull to make my own work for a long time. But working through the fire [in her study] and seeing the images I took of what remained from the fires felt like signs … I felt a sense of beautiful calm and a sense of protection from the ancestors — my grandfather, my mother.
“I knew I needed to make the work and it was a very generative, healing and powerful time for me to connect with the process of making again,” she says, adding the sense of a time for her to “take up space”.
By the end of winter she did fill the gallery space. It brimmed with her art, her conversation and her message still: art is hope, even when all around you, fires burn.
SIDEBAR —The art of healing
One of the most enduring projects from APS has been the Paper Prayer campaign initiated in 1997.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, The Paper Prayer workshops run by Berman invited people to create an anonymous prayer contained as imprint on paper. It was a wish for healing and a message of comfort as Aids laid waste to the lives of thousands.
The Paper Prayer concept leans on the Japanese tradition of paper fortunes tied to trees at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, to be carried away by the winds.
For APS, building awareness, advocacy and solidarity in a time of Aids denialism and death cemented the power of art for healing and activism.
Her desire to use art to heal also pushed her to establish a master’s programme in art therapy at UJ. Berman says: “We as artists are lucky; we have a medium that we can use to process feelings and work through our feelings, and I always feel that this is a gift.”
The Paper Prayer workshops continue. Berman hosted one as part of her launch events for her exhibition at the end of August. As with every workshop she asks participants to make two prints — one a prayer for themselves, and one a prayer for someone else who might need one.
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