NO SHOW MUSEUM

Pelindaba, 2013-2014

2nd | A  

In the 1970 and 80’s South Africa built six atom bombs in seemingly complete secrecy. As the apartheid system crumbled the program was swiftly disbanded before the advent of democracy. Pelindaba consists of more than 900 pages of declassified documents from various sources including the N.S.A., C.I.A. and internal government communications regarding South Africa’s clandestine Nuclear weapons program during apartheid. These documents cover a period of twenty-five years of South African nuclear policy, from early uranium supply arrangements under the United States-South Africa Atomic Energy Bilateral to the South African response to the September 1979 Vela incident and the subsequent destruction of its nuclear program. The documents being either classified or heavily redacted reveal nothing.

On the 9th of December 2013, the artist Vincent Bezuidenhout staged an intervention at the Picture Collection of the Mid-Manhattan Library, New York City. He took a set of prints of declassified, but completely redacted, documents from South Africa’s nuclear weapons program and anonymously inserted them into the Picture Collection under the following titled folders: Explosions; Radiation; Security; Documents- United States of America-1900; Detectives 1-3; Missions and Missionaries-Africa; Colonialism; Bombs; South Africa-Transvaal; Cowboys 1-5; Bible-David.

From the 3rd to the 17th of April 2014, as part of the exhibition Photoglobal New Releases through the School of Visual Arts New York, Vincent Bezuidenhout placed a stack of 900 pages of declassified documents on a plinth, the same size as the documents, inside a gallery on the Lower East side. The audience unable to page through these documents and unaware whether it was a work or simply gallery documentation, subsequently took pages of these documents home.

From the 16th of July to the 16th of August 2014, a selection of Pelindaba was shown at the exhibition GESTURE at the US Gallery, Stellenbosch, South Africa. Vincent Bezuidenhout emailed a PDF of these documents to the curator, who subsequently printed it out on an office printer and the individual pages were then pinned to the gallery wall.

The title "Pelindaba" is derived from the zulu words "pelile" meaning "finished" and "indaba" meaning "discussion".

Medium: Declassified documents, standard A4 copy paper