ART POD is an occasional series of recorded interviews with artists, curators and other creatives working with Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange.

First up is artist Gavin Jantjes, who speaks directly to the young curators of the 2020 exhibition Go On Being So at Newlyn Art Gallery, which included his work Freedom Hunters.

Go On Being So was curated by the MBA Collective, a group of art, photography and graphics students from Mounts Bay Academy aged between 12 and 16 years. An incidental conversation between the 14 students around what it means to be a global citizen was the starting point for their exploration of the Arts Council Collection, bringing together an intriguing selection of works that said something about the world today and their place in it. 

Gavin Jantjes was born in District Six, Cape Town, South Africa in 1948. In 1976 he briefly moved to London and worked with the Poster Collective, a politically motivated group producing posters and banners in response to the miners’ strike and conflicts in Vietnam and Ireland. Jantjes’ A South African Colouring Book, a set of anti-apartheid screen prints, was exhibited at the ICA in London. His exhibition coincided with the infamous 1976 Soweto Uprising in which students between the ages of 10 to 17 protested against the implementation of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction for their lessons rather than the students’ home languages. An estimated 20,000 young people took part nationwide. They were met with fierce police brutality. Jantjes editioned Freedom Hunters a year later in Hamburg, Germany where he then lived. He describes the political works he produced at this time as “A need to cry rage, yet simultaneously I wanted a voice that could sing a visual song for and of Black people.”

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