Freedom as Form: Gavin Jantjes, Anti-Apartheid, and the Transnational Avant-Garde

In Freedom as Form, Allison K. Young examines the artistic lineage and oeuvre of the South African artist Gavin Jantjes, a prolific printmaker, painter, writer, curator, and activist who fled apartheid to study in Germany and went on to take residence in England and Norway. Known for his portrayals of the global Black struggle for freedom that defy expectations of Black creativity within Eurocentric traditions, Jantjes’s art reflects experiences of apartheid, movement, and transformation. Spanning multiple localities, mediums, and styles, his practice is connected to numerous international milieus and artistic networks, from Cold War-era German art to British Pop, and from South African resistance art to the millennial global turn. Young situates Jantjes’s art across international curatorial and artistic debates, interdisciplinary platforms, and collective actions. In so doing, she models a methodology for a nomadic art history suited to the transnational, exilic experiences of twentieth-century artists whose lives were affected by migration—a methodology inspired by Jantjes’s own dialogic, interdisciplinary, and border-crossing practice that troubles boundaries of genre, style, and nation states.