Africa’s No 1 Arts Bookstore and Publisher

David Krut Publishing (DKP) and the Constitutional Court extend an invitation to you to explore the Court and its art collection, and visit the DKP bookstore on Constitution Square.

In honour of the Court DKP has published Light On a Hill: The Building of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and the soon to be released Art and Justice: The Art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Generously stocked with biographies, socio-political books, historical works, the DKP bookstore caters to all visitors wishing to know more about the formation of the modern South Africa, and those individuals who are most responsible for the creation of a nation with a renewed hope either through their political actions or artistic creations. Please take the time to browse the books and speak to our highly-knowledgeable bookstore manager, Gadi Magagane.

Constitution Hill is a joyous place. The public can go on hour-and-a-half guided tours of the Constitutional Court, Number Four and the Old Fort between 9am and 4pm every day. Some 10,000 visitors a month are learning the history of the site.

The artwork of the Constitutional Court consists is on display in the gallery and all other parts of the building. The other artworks of the Court are made up of integrated architectural artwork that form part of the fabric of the building itself. The artwork includes tapestries, engravings, sculptures, prints and paintings. The artworks dignify working people and depictions from foreign lands; others evoke the past or celebrate new beginnings. All are gifts to the highest court in the land and tributes to the Constitution and its values, and are commemorated in Art and Justice.

Almost as remarkable as the scope and size of the collection is the manner in which it was gathered. The art was the responsibility and passion of the judges of the Court itself. The artworks were not the fruits of a large budget. Rather, they were donations from artists, gallery owners and patrons of the arts through the sterling work of Justice Albie Sachs’s, which stretches back to the beginning of the Constitutional Court in 1994. He was appointed – with a fellow judge, Justice Yvonne Mokgoro – to take charge of decor when the Court was still in its old building. By all accounts, Sachs took on the job with gusto, laying the groundwork, driving the project, and commissioning specific pieces, and working very closely with the Artworks Committee of the Court.

“It was work that came to us,” he told the Sunday Times. “It is a collection that collected itself, and it is very much based on the passion and enthusiasm that the artists and arts community had for the achievement of democracy and what the Constitutional Court meant.”

At the end of the 80s, at a time when the anti-apartheid struggle was at its most intense, Albie Sachs, who was later to become a Constitutional Court judge, shook up the thinking of cultural activists who thought that art should be a “weapon in the struggle”. “What”, he asked “are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including our sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world? There is nothing that the apartheid rulers would like more than to convince us that because apartheid is ugly, the world is ugly.” What Sachs was calling for way back in 1989 was a broad, widely encompassing vision of art that told of our humanity in its variety, complexity and richness. It is this cultural vision, this vision of art as an expression of the spectrum of human dynamics that lies at the heart of the Constitutional Court’s collection.

Keywords: Art and Justice, Constitution Hill, Constitutional Court of South Africa, David Krut Publishing, David-Krut, Gadi Magagane, light-on-a-hill