For the first twenty years after apartheid, it may well be argued, art and performance were widely shaped by the framing intention of public intimacy. So much so, and across so many iterations that, by 2015, a major exhibition of South African art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts was held, with the title Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa. The frontispiece to the book that resulted is Zanele Muholi’s 2009 photographic installation Caitlin and I, capturing an after-sex moment between the artist and their (white) lover at the time. Njabulo Ndebele’s work on the ‘rediscovery of the ordinary’ was repeatedly cited during this period as a critical resource and articulation for the building of a more capacious and democratic public sphere through public expressions of intimacy and the multiple sharing of as many stories as possible.If his view was also that ‘public intimacies do need private intimacies’ (after the destruction of homes and intimacies that apartheid wrought), he embraced the dismantling, literally and figuratively, of systems of censorship and lack of access to a public sphere curtailed by apartheid’s repressive and white supremacist machinery.

In Mary Sibande’s 2013 series The Purple Shall Govern,purple roots, tentacles, snakes and suspended non-human entities emerge from the inside of a woman’s body. In the process of spilling, they draw a complex landscape of multiplicity and anguish. The interior exteriorises itself. The dream of Sibande’s semi-autobiographical figure, wrestling with spilling and transfiguration, was in part to free herself from herself – and from the lives of her mother and grandmother under racial rule: ‘I wanted to make something else I had never seen before,’ she said of the work.Several of Sibande’s female sculptural figures can be seen cupping their hands across their stomachs, attempting to hold in what is nevertheless pouring out. Sibande recalls a story told to her by her grandfather: ‘When he was young he was seriously injured and had to walk for kilometres with his intestines hanging out . . . holding his insides.’Penny Siopis, in a related vein, once described exhibiting her paintings as being like ‘crying in public’.In relation to her Shame series, she explored ‘a feeling of losing oneself in full view of others’.