Christiaan Diedericks – It’s a win!

Christiaan Diedericks – It’s a win!

Christiaan Diedericks is the Overall-WINNER of the Doctor Raya Mayo Award during the InkFest at the 5th Ink Masters Biennial 2021 held at the Tanks Art Centre, Cairns, Australia. With a prize of AU$8000 it drew more than 2700 international artists to compete, and two of Christiaan’s works made it to the final 100. Congratulations Christiaan!

We have the complete series available.

R13 800 each Unframed

R15 250 each Framed

Details for the winning work:

Let us Prey III (Against the winged dunes)

Drypoint, monotype and laser engraving on

300gsm Hahnemühle etching paper

Image size: 15 x 70cm

Paper size: 39 x 92cm

Ed.15

2020 (lockdown South Africa)

The winning work:

The complete series:

Artist’s statement for the winning work:

In the third work Let us Prey III (Against the winged dunes) the viewer is, at first glance, confronted by a monstrous (female?) figure with a bandaged head. The figure is delicately dangling a small hook just above a tiny house. The figure is the personification of the unknown fear we all experience at the onset of the pandemic. The media initially hooked all of us and our fear became exponentially larger as fake news, speculation and of course social media fueled it. This time of post-truth in our history (as personified by the tiny “haunted” house) is fertile ground for growing fear.

The second panel presents the viewer with a vast amount of human skulls scattered on “winged dunes”. To accentuate the reality of death two vultures are depicted hovering above. However, a little grace or hope is presented inside the outline of one vulture in the form of a hummingbird, a “little angel”. In the Christian religion according to the Bible, which emphasizes each creature and gives him or her the same importance while retaining his or her unique power, it has attributed the hummingbird with the power of spreading joy. They live a life that surpasses eternity making their existence a sign of eternity or infinity.

Many scientists immediately blamed China for their “wet markets”, forgetting that the West consumes other animals and especially many species from our oceans. We are hence all guilty, not only the Chinese nation. The last panel in this work depicts a health care worker in heavy protective gear spraying a room with disinfectant and in the process he is also spraying on a pangolin. The pangolin utters a swear word, since he was not the guilty species, it was discovered that the virus jumped from the pangolin to a bat and then to a human. The story goes that the Covid-19 virus mutated a second time in order to jump from a bat (this person ate bat sushi) to a human – that person became “patient zero”. According to many scientists coronaviruses can be transmitted between animals and people. Coronaviruses are zoonotic, meaning they are transmitted between animals and people.

There are multitudes of zoonotic diseases such as Anthrax. Detailed investigations found that SARS-CoV was transmitted from civet cats to humans and MERS-CoV from dromedary camels to humans. Several known coronaviruses are circulating in animals that have not yet infected humans. We are hence putting ourselves in grave danger by consuming different animal species. Common signs of infection include respiratory symptoms, fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases, infection can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, kidney failure, heart disease and even death.

 

Details on Let the Prey Series:

Conceptual background:

 pray

verb

  1. address a prayer to God or another deity.

“the whole family is praying for Michael”

adverb

  1. used as a preface to polite requests or instructions.

“ladies and gentlemen, pray be seated”

 

prey

noun

  1. an animal that is hunted and killed by another for food.

“the kestrel pounced on its prey”

 

ARCHAIC

plunder or (in biblical use) a prize.

 

verb

  1. hunt and kill for food.

“small birds that prey on insect pests”

 

After many in-depth conversations about my conceptual intent and ideas for the suite Let us prey between myself and award winning South African poet and dear friend Melanie Grobler, she wrote a poem specifically about the suite:

 

Prey

 

He has many tattoos on his body; the Hunter

his eyes are two ancient tortoises guiding him

through the mists of the Badlands to a strange lemon tree

 

grey clouds filled with pilchards and crested hawks

jellyfish and crowned seahorses become strange raindrops

allowing the tattooed one to enter the Kingdom of the Monarch moths

 

the meaning of fleetingness glides to forgetfulness

to the earlobes of creativity and the garden of peace

reserved for the small angels singing lullabies in their graves

 

this beach and this lagoon where you entered the stormy sea

of lost images, we are leaning against the winged dunes,

here our tears become light-crystals warning the fishermen

of the treacherous coastline.

 

  • Melanie Grobler

 

After I completed the full suite Melanie told me about her sleepless night pondering over these works and shared that the suite reminded her of Goya’s Disasters of war.

The title for my suite of 5 drypoints Let us prey is an ironic take on the Christian religious practice of praying. Typically, at the end of a sermon in church, the preacher would conclude by saying: “Let us pray”. In a nutshell, the works in the suite Let us Prey are socio-political comments about the time of the long, draconian lockdown due to the global Covid-19 pandemic in South Africa. The severity of the pandemic and the many deaths due to the Coronavirus in South Africa were completely overshadowed by corruption. The irony specifically lies in the fact that most members of our government claim to be living by Christian values.

Large scale looting of Covid-19 funds and corruption in general during this time is mindboggling. Millions, if not billions of South African Rands were stolen by the government. Prior to the lockdown the South African economy was already downgraded to “junk status” and our currency became increasingly weak against global markets. Preying in this context hence refers to the looting of the solidarity fund, state coffers and the misappropriation of funds often in the form of nepotism in South Africa. This preying by our government is unforgivable, not only did already poor people in South Africa nearly starved to death but many businesses also had to close their doors. In it’s archaic meaning preying refers to plunder or (in biblical use) a prize. Covid-19 has exposed and spurred long-needed action against corruption.

According to Corruption Watch South Africa “The perpetrators of this corruption have been unashamedly brazen in their hijacking of the emergency measures put into place to deal with COVID-19 in South Africa. Such measures included, among others, a R500-billion (US$30 billion) relief package to provide for food parcels for the needy, a temporary social grant increase for over 16 million beneficiaries and the Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (TERS) for those whose salaries were affected. To implement these and other measures, the government also put in place emergency procurement regulations. All of these have proved irresistible to those with thieving tendencies.”

Furthermore, according to an online source: www.allafrica.com, “183 schools have been targeted by vandals, burglars, and arsonists across the country since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown according to Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga. This comes as multiple suspects were arrested over looting at various liquor stores around the country. Mass evictions have also continued despite an official moratorium on the practice, resulting in scenarios like protesters in Khayelitsha, Cape Town who were forced from their homes over being unable to pay rent, being targeted by police using rubber bullets and pepper spray.”

This situation is however not unique to South Africa, the entire world economy took a harsh beating and many businesses globally suffered severely and or did not survive these lockdowns as a result of the pandemic. Globally, fake news seems to be at an all time high and greed and misplaced power exposed.

Each print in the Let us Prey suite is a hybrid print of three different printmaking techniques: drypoint on Plexiglass, monotype and laser engraving. To achieve the meticulous engraving I worked closely with a laser cutter/engraver in order to find the correct depth and detail for inking and printing the laser engraved matrixes, a process that was refined over weeks. I am not aware of any other artist attempting this rather difficult way of making a plate to print from. The small colour monotypes in each print act as “breathers”. The content of the hybrid prints are often so dark that the viewer’s eye needs to rest before viewing the next section of the print. However, the watery marks on these little plates may refer to blood and or injury.

The final works resemble filmstrips or snapshots of this crazy time globally. The “filmstrip” approach was a deliberate decision in order to create a “movie” of Covid-19 in the form of “silent” art or stills.

 

Individual works:

 

Let us Prey I (Through the lens of the grave)

Drypoint, monotype and laser engraving on

300gsm Hahnemühle etching paper

Image size: 15 x 70cm

Paper size: 39 x 92cm

Ed.15

2020 (lockdown South Africa)

 

Let us Prey I (Through the lens of the grave) the first print in the suite comments about the initial fear about huge amounts of people dying specifically in Italy and China and later on in Spain, France and especially the United States where the pandemic is still causing complete havoc. The virus became a predator (crocodile) wiping out vast amounts of people (floating skulls). Not much was known about this novel virus at that point and needless to say the world panicked. Fear hit the world like an atomic bomb and I am personally of the opinion that our generation is not mentally equipped to deal with a pandemic or for that matter any global disaster. At the beginning of the previous century people lived through two world wars, the Spanish flu as well as the Great Depression. Mental illness and the numbers of suicide escalated tremendously since the global outbreak of Covid-19 late 2019 but are rarely mentioned in the media. The media and especially social media fuelled this fear.

 

The first and last panels in this work, showing a mourning man with a dissolving face and a dead body covered with a white sheet, comment on the sad fact that people were not allowed in hospitals to visit their loved ones while they were dying due to Covid-19 and customary burials were not allowed. All human remains were cremated without any personal rituals for personal farewells or closure – “through the lens of the grave”. Melanie Grobler in her poem Prey writes so beautifully about this grim reality: “the garden of peace reserved for the small angels singing lullabies in their graves”.

 

 

Let us Prey II (Liar)

Drypoint, monotype and laser engraving on

300gsm Hahnemühle etching paper

Image size: 15 x 70cm

Paper size: 39 x 92cm

Ed.15

2020 (lockdown South Africa)

 

The second print Let us Prey II (Liar) puts a critical spotlight on the state of preparedness of countries and specifically South Africa in order to deal with the pandemic. Many hospitals in South Africa lacked proper PPE’s (personal protective equipment) especially for medical staff and frontline workers. The sub-standard cheaper equipment was purchased while the ones responsible pocketed most of the money. Furthermore, many hospitals were in total disarray, some in a shockingly filthy state. A draconian lockdown with many illogical restrictions were enforced by the military and police, initially intended to last only for three weeks, but more than six months later South Africa is still under lockdown. The last panel of this work criticizes the latter.

 

The first panel looks at the powers at be, our government looting and stealing like scavengers and a burning tree in the background became a symbol for a country burning. A tiny image of a (colonial – irony!)) man running away screaming is strategically placed under the fighting hyenas. This image is the personification of a statement by Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “This Government, our Government is worse than the Apartheid Government because at least you were expecting it with the Apartheid Government. Our Government: we were expecting that now we would have a Government that was sensitive to the sentiments of our Constitution. One of the big troubles is that the ANC on the whole, reckons that the freedom that we enjoy, is due to them. They reckon that everybody else is just a sideline.” (biznews.com)

 

However, the middle panel in this work might be the most poignant image of the pandemic in South Africa and comments on the lack of oxygen in many of our hospitals. The figure in the work is supplicating before Mother Nature, as if he is asking for forgiveness while still being hydrated by a single cloud in the sky. This image is also a sly reminder about the plight of our planet in general. The human species is consuming everything, almost to a point of no return. Our relationship with nature might very well become the cause for our total demise.

 

The last panel in the work reveals a desolated forsaken hospital room and is a commentary about our government again not being truthful about the state of some of our hospitals in South Africa during the peak of the pandemic. Medical Brief: Africa’s Medical Media Digest carried the following headline on their website on 15 July 2020: “Coronavirus chaos: BBC goes inside SA’s ‘hospitals of horrors”. According to the author of the online article Andrew Harding: “An exclusive, weeks-long investigation inside filthy hospitals in South Africa has exposed an extraordinary array of systemic failures showing exhausted doctors and nurses overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients and a health service near collapse. With key staff on strike or sick with coronavirus in the Eastern Cape, nurses are forced to act as cleaners, surgeons are washing their own hospital laundry and there are alarming reports of unborn babies dying in over-crowded and understaffed maternity wards.

 

As doctors, unions and management fight over scarce resources, one senior doctor described the situation as “an epic failure of a deeply corrupt system”, while another spoke of “institutional burn-out… a sense of chronic exploitation, the department of health essentially bankrupt, and a system on its knees with no strategic management”.

 

The revelations come just as South Africa – which held the coronavirus back for months with an early, tough and economically devastating lockdown – now sees infection rates soar nationwide, prompting President Cyril Ramaphosa to warn that ‘the storm is upon us’.” (medicalbrief.co.za). At the time, the real situation’s extend was of course never mentioned in the South African press!

 

 

Let us Prey III (Against the winged dunes)

Drypoint, monotype and laser engraving on

300gsm Hahnemühle etching paper

Image size: 15 x 70cm

Paper size: 39 x 92cm

Ed.15

2020 (lockdown South Africa)

 

In the third work Let us Prey III (Against the winged dunes) the viewer is, at first glance, confronted by a monstrous (female?) figure with a bandaged head. The figure is delicately dangling a small hook just above a tiny house. The figure is the personification of the unknown fear we all experience at the onset of the pandemic. The media initially hooked all of us and our fear became exponentially larger as fake news, speculation and of course social media fueled it. This time of post-truth in our history (as personified by the tiny “haunted” house) is fertile ground for growing fear.

 

The second panel presents the viewer with a vast amount of human skulls scattered on “winged dunes”. To accentuate the reality of death two vultures are depicted hovering above. However, a little grace or hope is presented inside the outline of one vulture in the form of a hummingbird, a “little angel”. In the Christian religion according to the Bible, which emphasizes each creature and gives him or her the same importance while retaining his or her unique power, it has attributed the hummingbird with the power of spreading joy. They live a life that surpasses eternity making their existence a sign of eternity or infinity.

 

Many scientists immediately blamed China for their “wet markets”, forgetting that the West consumes other animals and especially many species form our oceans. We are hence all guilty, not only the Chinese nation. The last panel in this work depicts a health care worker in heavy protective gear spraying a room with disinfectant and in the process he is also spraying on a pangolin. The pangolin utters a swear word, since he was not the guilty species, it was discovered that the virus jumped from the pangolin to a bat and then to a human. The story goes that the Covid-19 virus have had mutated a second time in order to jump from a bat (this person ate bat sushi) to a human – that person became “patient zero”. According to many scientists coronaviruses can be transmitted between animals and people. Coronaviruses are zoonotic, meaning they are transmitted between animals and people.

 

There are multitudes of zoonotic diseases such as Anthrax. Detailed investigations found that SARS-CoV was transmitted from civet cats to humans and MERS-CoV from dromedary camels to humans. Several known coronaviruses are circulating in animals that have not yet infected humans. We are hence putting ourselves in grave danger by consuming different animal species. Common signs of infection include respiratory symptoms, fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases, infection can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, kidney failure, heart disease and even death.

 

 

Let us Prey IV (Battlefield-Kingdom of the Monarch moths)

Drypoint, monotype and laser engraving on

300gsm Hahnemühle etching paper

Image size: 15 x 70cm

Paper size: 39 x 92cm

Ed.15

2020 (lockdown South Africa)

 

In Let us Prey IV (Battlefield-Kingdom of the Monarch moths) the main image is of two fighting bulls and depicts the inevitable battle between binary opposites: evil versus good, light versus dark etc. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. It is the contrast between two mutually exclusive terms, such as on and off, up and down, left and right. Binary opposition originated in Saussurean structuralist theory. The winged bull depicted on this panel reminds one of the famous Assyrian human-headed winged bull ca. 883–859 B.C. It was a composite of the most powerful and ferocious creatures known in the region, and this particular sculpture was huge – about 4.5m high, and up to 30 tonnes in weight. It stood at one of the many gates along Nineveh’s city walls, as a protective spirit and a symbol of the power of the Assyrian king.

 

Human beings are capable of both good and evil; we have a great capacity for both and it really comes down to a choice for each individual. I specifically chose bulls for this work since bulls epitomize masculinity in the animal kingdom, symbolizing strength and power in both their physical and spiritual presence with unmatched strength, power and dominating presence. Bulls were nearly equal to a king across many cultures, warranting praise and worship. This “fight between good and evil” may refer to many of the wrongs in South Africa painfully exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The bull is hence a powerful symbol for South Africa that is still very much a patriarchal society and a symbol of wealth in many African counties. Furthermore, racism is out of hand and crime and corruption are at an all time high.

 

Ironically, in the global economy bull markets are most common when the economy is growing, unemployment is low and inflation is somewhat tame. When someone says he is “bullish” on a single stock, he simply means he expects it to rise in price. This is of course not the case in South Africa, our economy has been downgraded to junk status by most rating agencies globally, unemployment is out of hand and poor people are even poorer.

 

The secondary image in this work depicts a man with his mouth wide open as if he is screaming. Monarch butterflies are hatching in his mouth and the man’s tongue is a cocoon. The butterfly is a symbol of transformation or rebirth. South Africa is on the verge of total economic collapse and the future looks rather bleak. Once again irony is deployed as a strategy since butterflies are supposed to be deep and powerful representations of life. Many cultures associate the butterfly with our souls. The Christian religion sees the butterfly as a symbol of resurrection. Around the world, people view the butterfly as representing endurance, change, hope, and life. South Africa indeed needs to be “resurrected” by a desperately needed “new order”. Personally I believe that this process of “resurrection” will take a few decades. The youth in South Africa, without the deeps scars of Colonialism and Apartheid and especially our black youth, undoubtedly is the hope for our future. My conversations with many black youngsters are testimony to the latter.

 

 

Let us Prey V (Through the mists of the badlands)

Drypoint, monotype and laser engraving on

300gsm Hahnemühle etching paper

Image size: 15 x 70cm

Paper size: 39 x 92cm

Ed.15

2020 (lockdown South Africa)

 

The fifth and final work Let us Prey V (Through the mists of the badlands) specifically addresses the issue of fear and ignorance in our “post-truth” world. What exactly is meant by the term “post-truth”? Paradoxically, “post-truth” is among the most-talked-about yet least-well-defined meme words of our time. According to an article on the website theconversation.com (author unknown): “most observers in the English-speaking world cite the 2016 Word of the Year Oxford English Dictionaries entry: post-truth is the public burial of ‘objective facts’ by an avalanche of media ‘appeals to emotion and personal belief’.” The author continues: “Post-truth has recombinant qualities. For a start, it is a type of communication that includes old-fashioned lying, where speakers say things about themselves and their world that are at odds with impressions and convictions that they harbour in their mind’s eye. Post-truth performances feed on their production of silence. They remind us, in the words of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, that:

 

the stupendous reality that is language cannot be understood unless we begin by observing that speech consists above all in silences.

 

The proponents of post-truth communication relish things unsaid. Their bluff and bluster is designed not only to attract public attention.It simultaneously hides from public attention things (such as growing inequalities of wealth, the militarisation of democracy and the accelerating death of non-human species) that it doesn’t want others to notice, or that potentially arouse suspicions of the style and substance of post-truth politics.”

 

I am of the opinion that the current American president Donald Trump is a gleaming example of “post-truth”. He blatantly lies and deceits even during live interviews and or debriefings by the press and especially on the social media platform Twitter. Trump’s ardent denial of climate change and the possible demise of human beings as a result was a spark for this work. At the current rate global warming and climate change will wipe the human race off the face of the planet in only a few decades. Nature will continue to flourish as the planet heals herself. Clouds will literally replace people as suggested in the two right hand panels of Let us Prey V (Through the mists of the badlands. However, in my work the clouds replacing the human heads is a hint that I personally think most politicians are empty-headed and clueless or “air heads”, they are self-serving idiots, greedy and hungry for power and absolute control. A few, mostly female presidents, are of course exceptions to this grim reality.

 

The image on the far left hand side of the work speaks about fearmongering. According to the Oxford dictionary online, fearmongering is the action of deliberately arousing public fear or alarm about a particular issue. Also know as scaremongering, fearmongering is the spreading of frightening and exaggerated rumors of an impending danger to purposely arouse fear in order to manipulate the public. With the coronavirus in full flow across the world, the biggest problem isn’t just COVID-19 but the epidemic of misinformation passing around, ranging from conspiracy theories to cures and anti-mask myths. The fake news is accelerated by social media and furthered by agencies with agendas, all with the apparent aim of harming the fight against the virus. Social media is already ablaze with false information about the Covid-19 pandemic for example how President Trump added fuel to the fire by retweeting a false video about an anti-malaria drug being a cure for the virus.

 

I recently watched a brilliant documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix. This documentary from Jeff Orlowski explores how addiction and privacy breaches are features, not bugs, of social media platforms. The New York Times online states that: “That social media can be addictive and creepy isn’t a revelation to anyone who uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. But in Jeff Orlowski’s documentary “The Social Dilemma,” conscientious defectors from these companies explain that the perniciousness of social networking platforms is a feature, not a bug.

 

According to The New York Times online (9 September 2020), Jeff Orlowski states “that social media can be addictive and creepy isn’t a revelation to anyone who uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like.” However, in The Social Dilemma “conscientious defectors from these companies explain that the perniciousness of social networking platforms is a feature, not a bug. They claim that the manipulation of human behavior for profit is coded into these companies with Machiavellian precision: Infinite scrolling and push notifications keep users constantly engaged; personalized recommendations use data not just to predict but also to influence our actions, turning users into easy prey for advertisers and propagandists.

 

Despite their vehement criticisms, the interviewees in ‘The Social Dilemma’ are not all doomsayers; many suggest that with the right changes, we can salvage the good of social media without the bad. But the grab bag of personal and political solutions they present in the film confuses two distinct targets of critique: the technology that causes destructive behaviors and the culture of unchecked capitalism that produces it.”

 

Lastly, on the flip side of the coin, Sweden was the one and only global example of a country without a strict lockdown (and the accompanying fearmongering) during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, despite never implementing a full-scale lockdown, Sweden has managed to flatten its curve, prompting its health leadership to claim victory but many experts question the cost of the strategy, as the country has a far higher death toll than its Scandinavian neighbors.