Volume 4 of Visual Century: South African Art in Context 1907-1948 is part of a four-volume publication that reappraises South African visual art of the twentieth century from a postapartheid perspective. The years 1990 to 2007 are covered in Volume 4, edited by Thembinkosi Goniwe, Mario Pissarra and Mandisi Majavu. The end of the Cold War and subsequent emergence of globalisation, along with the advent of democracy in South Africa introduced new social and political orders, with profound implications for South African artists. Concurrently, the persistence of economic inequalities and conflicts within and beyond national borders constantly mitigated against an unbridled celebration of `freedom'. The essays in this volume critically address some of the most notable developments and visible trends in postapartheid South African art. These include South Africa's entry into the international art community, its struggle to address its past, and artists' persistent and often provocative preoccupations with individual and collective identity. The widespread and often unsettling representation of human bodies, as well as animal forms, along with the steady increase in use of new technologies and the development of new forms of public art are also discussed. While much of the art of the period is open-ended and non-didactic, the persistence of engagement with socially responsive themes calls into question the reductive binary between `resistance' and post-apartheid art that has come to dominate accounts of `before' and `after'.

Volume 3 of Visual Century: South African Art in Context 1907-1948 is part of a four-volume publication that reappraises South African visual art of the twentieth century from a postapartheid perspective. Edited by Mario Pissarra, the volume looks at the years 1973 to 1992. The forw0rd by Rashied Araeen titled `Art and Human Struggle', sets the theme for this period. Bracketed by porous transitional moments in the early 1970s and 1990s, this volume covers a period characterised by a deepening of the struggle for democracy, a time when historical preoccupations with race were increasingly complemented with growing discourses on class and gender. It was a time when unprecedented internal and external pressure resulted in heightened introspection and action in and through the visual arts. The essays address a multiplicity of ways in which artists responded directly and indirectly to the challenges of this period, mostly as individuals but also through organisations. Resistance and complicity, and the spaces between, found expression in the use of everyday themes, biblical sources, ethnically derived themes, subtle and extreme forms of humour, as well as through representations of conflict. This is a period when challenging art was produced in community arts centres, universities and in public places, a time when the cultural boycott simultaneously united and polarised artists, and exiles mediated the ambivalences of `home'.

This project is the first to bring together such a wide range of local writers and perspectives. Project initiator and director Gavin Jantjes is a South African artist currently based at Norway's National Museum. Pallo Jordan, former Minister of Arts and Culture, supported the idea with seed funding to commission and develop the manuscript. Jantjes, together with editor-in-chief, Mario Pissarra of Africa South Arts Initiative (ASAI), commissioned and oversaw the exciting process of writing the book.