Fortuna ,1993
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Notes : Deborah Bell’s Fortuna was produced at a critical time in South Africa’s history, after Nelson Mandela’s release from incarceration and in the build-up to the first democratic elections in 1994 – a period of transition fraught with political violence and instability and yet permeated with hope. Fortuna is thus an apt vehicle for reflecting on those times. As the Roman goddess of fortune and the personification of luck, she was often depicted with a ball or Rota Fortunae (wheel of fortune). She might bring good or bad luck: she could be represented as veiled and blind, as in modern depictions of Lady Justice, and came to represent life’s capriciousness. Bell notes that this work was produced in the wake of Easing the Passing (of the Hours), a computer animation produced collaboratively with William Kentridge and Robert Hodgins.
1 Aware of the ending of an era, the film is dominated by a legless general in a wheelchair, his puppet and the crowds that he addresses and is interspersed with a beheaded man, dancing nudes, microphones and the paraphernalia of despots. Some of these elements find their way into the present work: the general astride his wheel of fortune, as if cycling through history, while a nude woman dances like Salome at a feast. A phallic gun and the gloves and boots of workers or the military are strewn about, reinforcing associations of brutal power. Made at a time when Bell was exploring the visual and conceptual potential of torn colour collages, the medium itself contributes to the meaning of the work. ‘The sense of displacement and fragmentation of lives which occurs as a result of oppressive regimes is reflected in the spatial arrangement of the images on the page’ as Pippa Stein so perceptively points out (2004)2. While the signifiers of that remarkable era are invoked, any sense of a coherent narrative structure is challenged, alluding to portentous events, but leaving the viewer to piece together the fragments.
Emma Bedford
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