BASIL COLIN FRANK - Some of my best friends
Installation, Sculpture
1971-2
ht.160cm 120cm 180cm 145cm 125cm.
plaster chains twigs circular metal base
My sculpture , heads void of vital senses eyes ears and nose perched on welded chains Signs -twigs antennas of communication one cannot imprison an idea. Monument, homage to those vanished under the South African Apartheid regime. The work was site specific in this instance was placed on the beach 4 kilometers from Robben Island where Mandela and his comrades were once imprisoned.
Anchored and Chained (Homage to the victims of oppression from Auschwitz to Robben island my uncle Aaron Frank to Nelson Mandela)
No one can murder an idea
Whether it be chained tortured and gassed
Even though the searchlights will draw its arc across the world
through mists and storms
And dropped papers
from the ivory guard towers
blackened with their faeces
and ashes of their cancerous smoke
The codex will be deciphered
read and redeemed
There is always an escape
out of the earths dungeons
Into deaths dimensions
Where the ark in the ether
floats and all that
sailed upon her.