Strategically placed on a site between the MuseumAfrica and the Electric Workshop, the fringe exhibition entitled 'The Laager' rapidly became one of the major attractions at the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale. Curated and organised by Wayne Barker, 'The Laager' was a circle of inward-facing shipping containers, housing installations by fourteen otherwise uninvited exhibitors - Brett Murray, Hentie van der Merwe, Werner Vermeulen and Barker himself amongst them. Its popular appeal lay not only in the contributions of the artists, but in the construction of the exhibition space: historically, the 'laager' is powerfully loaded metaphor. It was the almost impregnable battle formation assumed by the Voortrekkers, a compact ring of wagons, a controlling orbit of defence. For the Voortrekker the threat was everywhere and came at a 360 degree angle. For Barker. an equivalent threat works within the art world. At once defensive and offensive, his 'laager' drew attention to the fact that the selection processes for the Biennale were largely in the of foreign curators, thus excluding tiiany local artists. The show as a whole had a contemporary energy which led to an invitation to re-stage the event in Chile.		Barker's contribution in Santiago was a 'sentimental' and 'rough' installation entitled A Time to Love, catholic and funereal in its elements. A Sunday Star poster explained why a mother killed her children. A cardboard box with hearts cut out served as a support for a formal request for cadavers. There mas an old poster of the Battle of Blood River, a 'little bowl for tears', a bottle containing a cross, sangoma beads, an army uniform and a souvenir plate with an image of Nelson Mandela. The whole was washed with little spotlights. At the heart lay 'the question of faith and God' and an interrogation of the 'culture of death' in industrial societies. For the past twelve years Barker's obective as an artist and curator has been to remove art from the privileged and dead enclosures into which he feels it has retreated. The source of his art is life. 'I go into the world and discover things as opposed to maybe sitting back and trying to see.' There is nothing dispassionate in Barker's interventions. He speaks with a hands-on fluency of car theft, taxi wars, the cheapness of life, of gallery conventions abroad, the slaughtering of a a cow in the townships, a Zulu wedding, of hospices and squatter camps. More..
Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal in Art in South Africa - the future present