Foreword

by, Professor Federico Freschi

Executive Dean | Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture

University of Johannesburg

Kim Berman’s remarkable journey as an artist, educator and social activist is one that has consistently blurred the boundaries between making, teaching and transforming. Across a career spanning decades, her practice as an artist and educator has been deeply rooted in a vision of art as a vehicle for healing, for confronting injustice and for creating spaces of possibility. This exhibition – poignant, courageous and powerfully timely – offers a window into the multifaceted world she has shaped and nurtured.

The enduring relevance of Berman’s work is underscored by her unwavering belief that creativity and community are inseparable . Her generous mentorship of generations of young artists, both through her long and impressive teaching career in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Johannesburg and her leadership of Artist Proof Studio, embody a consistent ethos: that art making is an act of hope, of resistance and collective memory. Whether exploring the scars of apartheid, the environmental and spiritual costs of mining or the intimate pane of personal and intergenerational trauma, Berman’s work invites us not just to look, but to reckon, to feel and to act.

The essays in this catalogue – by long-standing collaborators, peers and colleagues – testify to the wide and generous arc of her influence. They trace themes of destruction, regeneration, loss and resilience. They vividly evoke an art practice that is never passive, but always engaged: with history, with land, with those rendered voiceless or invisible. These texts illuminate the subtle interplay between beauty and burden that characterises Berman’s visual language, whether delicate drypoint etchings bearing witness to grief, intricately constructed artist’s books that open like memory boxes or expressive large-scale prints that burn with symbolic urgency.

In many ways this exhibition is a culmination, a drawing together of the threads that have defined Berman’s creative life over the past four decades. But it is also a beginning. The body of work celebrated here speaks urgently to the wicked crises of our time: ecological collapse, displacement, inequality, violence. But at the same time they speak of renewal, care, generosity and a belief in the transformative power of justice. Indeed, it is this very duality, the ability to hold pain and possibility in the same gesture, that is the hallmark of Berman’s practice and pedagogy and which these writers beautifully bring to life in the pages of this book.

At a moment when so much feels fractured, uncertain and imperilled, Berman’s work reminds us that art can still be a site of repair. She invites us to see the world through her eyes, and in so doing offers dignity, empathy and the power of human connection as a way to reimagine a path forward. This exhibition does not offer easy answers, but it does offer a powerful invitation: to listen, to witness and to imagine otherwise.

It is an honour to introduce this body of work, and the extraordinary woman behind it. May the reflections gathered here inspire, challenge and move us just as Kim Berman’s work continues to do.

Ash Scapes I, 2024, Monoprint, Published by The Artists’ Press