Buhlebezwe Siwani, Berni Searle and Lien Botha are three South African woman artists who have made works where the ocean (and, more broadly, water and its properties) plays a central role. In this paper, I select one performance work by each artist, documented in video and still photography, where the element of the artist entering or in the ocean is central to the issues explored in each work. Water represents a repository of cultural memories and meanings for each artist, and the ways in which each artist intervenes in this flow of experience, for herself and on behalf of others, is what I discuss here.
Working from, and with, very different cultural traditions, it is unsurprising perhaps that these three artists have not hitherto been examined together. Buhlebezwe Siwani (born 1987) is both an artist and iSangoma (a traditional healer). In her work uThengisa unokrwece elunxwemene (2014), and also drawing in Mhlekazi (2015) and Qunusa, Buhle! (2016), I examine how Siwani draws upon layered African traditions of spiritual purification in rivers and oceans. In exploring cleansing as a way of purifying and structuring memory, I focus on Siwani's use of green soap and language in her critique of a gendered cleansing of the female body. Berni Searle (born 1961), whom Siwani credits as an artistic influence, created Home and Away (2003), which references the perilous journey taken by migrants across the Mediterranean Sea. I discuss how diasporic cultural crossings caught in currents of language are symbolised through the release of ink into the water and the performance's voiceover. Lien Botha’s Cutting Water (2005) engages with the suicides by drowning of Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker and English novelist Virginia Woolf. In this work, Botha (born 1961) initiates a dialogue with her literary and artistic progenitors in order to establish not an ancestral lineage but an enquiry into the unsettled aspects of female subjectivity as it is manifested in the context of psycho-social illness. I show how the currents that pass between these artists’ works all converge around issues of personal and cultural memory and identity.