Hosted by the Consul General of South Africa, as a joint venture between NGMA, Ministry of Culture and Iziko Museum of Cape Town, South Africa, the exhibition showcases Ancient and Contemporary South African visual arts for the very first time in the country and is on till February 3.

South Africa, like India, is diverse and culturally rich and is a subcontinent that has witnessed similar invasions, struggles and occupations by other cultures. As Professor Wiseman Nkhuhulu wrote in 1990, “Various peoples of Southern Africa have lived together for more than 300 years. However, the country as such has no objectives or values that are national, no common myths, no common heroes, no war victories to commemorate together and no statues or symbols of joint accomplishment. Instead, we have the memory and scars of the suffering that we have inflicted on each other. In South Africa's art we see the visual evidence of the healing power of creativity in an ongoing situation of conflict, crisis and survival.”

The intention is to impress on each visitor an awareness of the antiquity and immense diversity of South African visual art, stretching back to the first evidence of human mark-making to the art of the present. “An underlying theme will emphasise how multiple forces, both natural and political, have always conspired to create a situation of struggle, competition and survival in the sub-continent that has been hundreds of years, if not millennia, in the process,” says Rajiv Lochan, director of NGMA.

The exhibition the metaphor of scratching is extended to a variety of meanings to tell a history of South African art. From the earliest-known example of a piece of scratched ochre (to be shown in replica form) to the rock engravings and paintings to incised objects,