Apartheid ended with the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994 but the difficulties of social transition continue to inform contemporary artworks. This paper presents a brief survey of the effects and after-effects of political turmoil in South Africa, demonstrating how artists have responded to the status quo through transgressive reinterpretations of Christian imagery. Christian iconography is familiar in many cultures, however the introduction of Christianity has particular relevance in South Africa as it has been implicated in the Colonial project. Art employing Christian iconography, made during the apartheid regime in South Africa, appears to subtly adapt the Christian message to support a political agenda in a way that avoids the threat of censorship. Examples made in the transitional phase (from the late 1980s) and after the dismantling of apartheid, however, are more overtly critical of both religious constructs and politics, and could be termed ‘transgressive’. Working in light of Foucault’s idea of an ‘ontology of the present’ I investigate the ways in which religious iconography has been implicated in the regulation of South African society and demonstrate how subversive appropriations of Christian imagery can expose these controls and offer a critique of mechanisms which produce normative ‘truths’.