Clive van den Berg is responsible for the art and design of several of South Africa’s most prominent public projects, including the landmark Northern Cape Legislature, the Mandela Foundation museum exhibitions for the Center of Memory, and the museums of Constitution Hill. On large-scale institutional projects, van den Berg typically operates with teams representing diverse constituencies: urban planners and policy makers, architects, landscape designers, museum curators, community liaison officials and representatives of local governments.

At Kimberley, where he worked with the Luis Ferreira da Silva architects, van den Berg pioneered a new strategy for integrating forms of the local landscape and indigenous aesthetics into the overall building design, while also training local artisans as part of a skills transference project aimed at long-term sustainability. The result is a world-renowned and uniquely South African state edifice: a monument to the people of the Northern Cape. Every project commences with an assessment of the history of the location, its social possibilities and its aesthetic needs. Van den Berg endeavors to incorporate art into all aspects of the design - and never leaves it as a mere afterthought to site construction.

The museums of Constitution Hill, which van den Berg designed, informed by a team consisting of Lauren Segal, Steve Mokoena, Audrey Brown, Sharon Court, Mark Gevisser and Churchill Madikida, were produced in spaces that had once served as prisons, and their transformation is intended to achieve a threefold goal: to preserve individual and collective memory about the prisons and experiences that people had in them; to educate future publics about the place of the prisons in South African history; and to create aesthetic forms appropriate to a hybrid institution where the work of the museum is combined with that of ongoing research and policy-making. The visual organization of Constitution Hill, the use of both old materials and new curatorial strategies, is based in the belief that institutional space shapes social relationships.

In contemporary South Africa, much public institutional design is aimed at the cultivation of memory and the memorialization of the past. Van den Berg’s integrative approach to art and architectural construction has allowed him to produce spaces in which previously unheard or even suppressed narratives can also be articulated. His exhibitions for the Mandela Foundation have been oriented toward this end: in showcasing materials from the Foundation’s archive, he has developed exciting new formats and vocabularies in which to reveal a past that had hitherto remained largely unknown, making it accessible to a new generation of South African citizens.

Several of these monumental projects has been the subject of a major book. Both “A Prisoner in the Garden,” the exhibition curated for the Mandela Foundation, and the Constitution Hill museums are the objects of books published by Penguin Press.

Text © Rosalind Morris 2005