Philippe Marinig
Bester was born in the nearby town of Montagu in 1956, eight years after apartheid was legislated in his country. His childhood was littered with evidence of the ways discriminatory racial segregation laws created disparate living conditions among South Africans. Growing up in poverty, he was forced to improvise and be imaginative; he used discarded wire and plastic bottles to sculpt play objects. Later, he transformed the same bric-a-brac—which he gathers from, among other spots, scrapyards and garbage dumps—into powerful works of art. The late curator Okwui Enwezor once described Bester’s art as fashioning “a critique in which the Black subject is able to speak.”