Anton Kannemeyer
Biography
The South African comic author Anton Kannemeyer was born in Cape Town in 1967. His comics are shaped by his childhood as a white South African under apartheid. In his stories there are no transfigurations and explanations, but disturbance and provocation. His pseudonym Joe Dog, under which he sometimes works, is also a gesture of dissociation from his parental home and origins.
In drastic, sometimes provocative scenes, he plays intelligently with white prejudices against people of colour in general and against men of colour in particular. He is usually assisted by Conrad Botes, whom he met in 1988 while studying graphic design at Stellenbosch University. The two founded the still existing comic magazine Bitterkomix in 1992.
Bans, censorship, colour attacks in exhibitions have accompanied Kannemeyer's work from the beginning. It may have seemed particularly provocative to many that his comics about sex and religion, violence and authority come across in the style of Hergé's “Ligne Claire”, that he convicts Hergé's authority of its racist projections.
Kannemeyer's work now hangs in museums around the world, including MOMA in New York and SFMOMA in San Francisco. Recent group exhibitions include King of the Hill at Jack Shainman Gallery (2019), Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design (2015-2019), Africa Now: Political Patterns, at the Seoul Museum of Art (2014-2015), and Public Intimacy: Art and Social Life in South Africa (2014), at SFMOMA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.