New exhibition challenges legacy of Voortrekker Monument
It’s noon and the sunbeam is late, curated by Lily van Rensburg, examines the legacy of the Voortrekker Monument through contemporary art at Wits University’s Origins Centre.
Image: Supplied
A Cape Town-born curator is using contemporary art to spark new conversations about one of South Africa’s most powerful and contested historical symbols, the Voortrekker Monument.
Lily van Rensburg, now based in Johannesburg, has curated It’s noon and the sunbeam is late, an exhibition at the Origins Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand that explores how the monument’s legacy continues to shape South Africa’s historical imagination.
The exhibition brings together artworks created between 1988 and 2026 by artists including Penny Siopis, Sechaba Maape, Diane Victor, Haroon Gunn-Salie and Steven Cohen.
Rather than advocating for the monument’s removal, the exhibition critically reframes it through contemporary artistic responses.
Visitors encounter a range of works including film, sculpture, archival material and prints that question how monuments shape public memory and identity.
One of the centrepieces is a video installation by Van Rensburg that combines archival footage from the Voortrekker Monument with home movies and historical film reels documenting the 1938 Great Trek centenary celebrations and the monument’s inauguration in 1949. The fragmented footage collapses past and present into what the curator describes as an unstable timeline, highlighting how archives can function as instruments of ideology.
Another key work is Ons vir jou (2026), a stone sculpture created by Van Rensburg and artist Haroon Gunn-Salie. The piece was carved from granite sourced from the same quarry that supplied the stone cladding for the monument’s cenotaph in 1949. However, the artists deliberately removed the words “Suid Afrika” from the inscription, leaving only “Ons vir jou”.
The alteration symbolically questions the monument’s historic claims to national identity while inviting viewers to reconsider its meaning today.
Other works revisit the monument through different lenses. Penny Siopis contributes objects from her long-running artwork Will, including a vinyl record of speeches by former apartheid prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd and a miniature painting of the monument.
Artist Sechaba Maape presents a fictional character named Bushie, a boy of mixed Griqua and Afrikaner heritage who realises that people like him are absent from the monument’s official narrative and sets out on a journey that imagines transforming it.
The exhibition’s title references the annual ritual historically held at the monument on December 16, when a beam of sunlight passes through the dome at noon and illuminates the cenotaph bearing the inscription “Ons vir jou, Suid Afrika”.
Van Rensburg hopes the exhibition will encourage audiences, particularly younger generations, to question how history is constructed and remembered.
It’s noon and the sunbeam is late runs until March 14 at the Origins Centre in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.