The South African Art Centre: a bygone ideology of Critical Selfhood?

The political posters produced by art centres are their most celebrated contribution to the struggle to end Apartheid. However art centres made another valuable contribution by encouraging a form of critical selfhood. This type of internal struggle against inferiority was formulated by the Black Consciousness Movement and is an important element in transformation. However with the end of Apartheid this contribution seems to have been dismissed, alongside poster production, as irrelevant to the new nation. The author investigates how the art centre functioned as a vehicle for critical selfhood and argues for its contemporary relevance