The Culture Edit: Art, memory and reverence of soft vengeance

Time Out

27-07-2025

'People go to an exhibition expecting to be bored, to be quite candid, and they're delighted when it's not,' Albie Sachs tells me in a near-whisper, leaning in during the opening of Spring Is Rebellious, now on at Zeitz MOCAA.
'And I think this is a total surprise,' he adds with a glint of mischief.
Listening to Sachs reflect on a turbulent period in Southern Africa's history, and his own life as an activist, is quite something.
There's a radical optimism in it. Not the hollow kind peddled by revivalists, but something more complex: a joy hard-won, defiant, and elevating.
The curatorial approach, led by Dr Phokeng Setai, resists the trap of monumentalising one man (though Sachs, by all accounts, deserves it).
Instead, it becomes its own rebellion against the singular hero narrative.
And yet Sachs, with his signature blend of humility, humour, and piercing intellect, still anchors the experience. His personal collection, along with that of the Constitution Collection (commissioned and curated under his watch), shapes the experience.
His story, including surviving a car bomb planted by apartheid security forces that cost him an arm and the sight in one eye, is not presented as tragedy. It becomes, in his words, a testament to 'the intense joy of survival.'
Yes, it's a historical exhibition and a biography - but also a deeply moving love letter to a life lived in full colour. A life of freedom fighting, legal vision, Constitutional Court judge and an unwavering belief in the transformative power of art.
Curated by Setai and a team of young curators mentored by the late Koyo Kouoh - to whom the exhibition is dedicated - Spring Is Rebellious lands with remarkable subtlety.
'Africa's stories are often told through singular biographical lives. We wanted to let the art and the artists bring the complexity and layers to the narrative of this exhibition," Setai says.
And they do.
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A Revolution of Feeling
What emerges is not a dry litany of accolades, but an emotional architecture in what Sachs himself calls a 'big emotional palette.'
'It's very public and very private at the same time,' Sachs says. 'It's not a historical narrative. It's an emotional one.'
Crucially, it never feels didactic.
This is not protest art with a slogan, nor a catalogue of suffering.
In his 1989 essay Preparing Ourselves for Freedom, written for an ANC cultural seminar in exile, Sachs wondered whether we had 'sufficient cultural imagination to grasp the rich texture of the free and united South Africa we have done so much to bring about.'
That same question pulses through this exhibition.
While Sachs' memories of Mozambique's revolution included children sculpting ephemeral art in sand under the guidance of artist Malangatana Ngwenya. It reminds that culture and creative expression were never just an accessory to struggle.
It was survival itself.
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The soft vengeance of refusing to become what you survived
One of the most stirring elements of the exhibition is how it gives material form to Sachs's ideology of soft vengeance.
Behind a velvet curtain and bathed in muted grey-blue, this quiet room in the exhibition offers a tender counterpoint to the fire of activism.
Here, Sachs' voice fills the air, recounting the 1988 Maputo car bomb that nearly ended his life.
But the story told isn't one of revenge. It's one of survival, healing, and what he later called soft vengeance: the quiet, radical act of choosing life, memory, and justice over hatred.
Two artworks ground the space: a poignant wooden sculpture by Mozambican artist Naftal Langa, showing a couple grappling with the scars of war, and a stark photograph of Sachs in his London apartment, his amputated arm captured in mirror and shadow.
It's a room of reckoning, where trauma acts as an uncomfortable truth - a wound, not hidden, but instead opening up toward something far greater.
As Sachs says, justice is "refusing to become what you have survived."
'They tried to kill me, and I lost an arm,' he says with typical bluntness, 'but I lived. I got to help write our Constitution.'
His vengeance is in living, not in bitterness or rage, but in beauty and joy.
The show is both irreverent and serious at the same time. Archival protest posters sit beside odes to jazz and arson. Its storytelling spans exile, solitary confinement, and ultimately homecoming.
And the title? Taken from a paper that sparked both debate and delight among his comrades - reminds us: Spring is rebellious, then and now.
It honours not just Sachs, but the artists, activists, and everyday people whose creative resistance has shaped South Africa and the continent in unexpected, enduring ways.
At 90, Sachs continues to write and inspire, offering as a living reminder that as our democracy matures, so too must our capacity to reimagine it.
The revolution, he suggests, is not a moment, but a mindset needing constant renewal.
'If spring was rebellious then,' he says, 'autumn is rebellious now.'