The San Pedro V Omnibus, transmitted without permission from CENTRÅL Pirate Broadcasting Station, Johannesburg.
Adilson De Oliveira
1 October 2026
Picture, if you will, an artist, South African, recurring emergency — Tracey Rose. Beside her, San Pedro: pink, half-naked, divinely unemployable, clutching an electric guitar as though Moses descended Sinai with a Fender in hand, a heavy hangover and a urinary tract infection. Before the lies: Palestine, occupation, apartheid accusations, genocide proceedings, nationalism, God, history and roughly eighty years of people insisting the programme only began with the episode they happened to switch on that day. Somewhere in Basel a collector has swallowed an olive, whole. In Bern, Legal has felt a disturbance in the Force. A curator has whispered “context” three times into a mirror and accidentally summoned an actual half-decent exhibition with context. Communications is barricaded in the disabled toilet drafting a statement beginning with, “We condemn Hamas.” A museum director is Googling whether artistic freedom is legally binding. Somebody has called the board. Nobody knows why. The sphincters are now tightening in several European time zones. And cutting right through all of this comes San Pedro, badly playing an anthem beside a wall somebody mistook for eternity, preparing to achieve with one functioning bladder what decades of diplomacy, curatorial mediation and tasteful institutional prose somehow could not. Welcome to CENTRÅL — where the projector is overheating, the saint is taking his trousers down, history has kicked the studio door off its hinges, and everybody is leaving the curator on read. You are travelling through another dimension, one far beyond the measure of sight and sound, outside known sensory comprehension: donor anxiety, colonial amnesia, bureaucratic cowardice, and absolutely immaculate wall vinyl. Do not adjust your set. Do not alert Security. And whatever you do, do not ask for more context. This is the Twilight Zone — except the monster on the wing is institutional respectability, and San Pedro has just opened her fly.
‘SAN PEDRO V OMNIBUS: U’R A NATION’ gathers a body of work that has spent more than twenty years behaving badly in public. Filthy, blasphemous, ridiculous, theatrical, politically awkward and frequently impossible to defend without first castrating it. The work survives because Rose has never been especially interested in making dissent respectable. Respectability is what institutions manufacture afterwards, once the dangerous thing has acquired provenance and the urine has evaporated off the floor.
In 2005 — before Palestine became a seasonal password of the international art world, before solidarity acquired a typeface and before museums perfected the lawyered statement — Rose needed to get to Jerusalem. By her own telling, Linda Givon was effectively hoodwinked into helping her get there. The respectable pitch was irresistible: Rose wanted to sit on the Mount of Olives, that magnificently overburdened hill sacred to three religions, and make Waiting for God — an artist sitting quietly in the Holy Land, contemplating faith, absence, revelation, the usual high-grade spiritual catnip that dealers and institutions shoot up like a junkie that just scored a free bag of China white. Givon helped finance the trip. Lovely. Meditative. Profound. Except Rose had another appointment. She got to Jerusalem, put on the fishnets, painted herself pink, picked up an electric guitar, went to the separation wall at sunrise, mangled Hatikva and pissed on the concrete. The contemplative pilgrimage had contained a Trojan horse. Linda thought she was helping send an artist to the Mount of Olives to wait for God; Rose was also going there to take a leak on the architecture of occupation. Artists have been bullshitting patrons since patrons first acquired money. Rose simply had the good manners to make the resulting work worth the lie.
At sunrise, painted pink and wearing fishnets and leopard-print underwear, she became San Pedro. She took an electric guitar and played Hatikva badly beside the separation barrier, then urinated on it. Contemporary accounts and later exhibition material describe precisely this performance, including its deliberately mangled rendition of the Israeli anthem and its final act of urination.
It is difficult to improve upon the economy of the gesture. No symposium. No moderator. No six-person panel called Embodied Resistance and Contested Geographies. A wall, an anthem, a painted fool, a guitar, a bladder. Power can withstand denunciation with remarkable composure. It has communications departments for that. It can fund denunciation, insure it, ship it internationally, photograph itself standing beside it and pour the wine afterwards. Ridicule is less flattering. A wall may survive being called oppressive. It looks considerably less magnificent with piss running down it.
Rose’s intelligence lies partly in refusing the heroic pose expected of political art. San Pedro does not stand nobly before the architecture of occupation. He minces, plays badly, becomes vulgar, makes an idiot of himself. The anthem becomes noise. The saint becomes a clown. The monument becomes somewhere to take a leak. Rose soils her own authority while she soils everybody else’s.
This is precisely why the work has always been troublesome to institutions. Museums enjoy political art in much the same way wealthy people enjoy punk records: once the volume has been lowered. They like resistance accompanied by wall text, rebellion supplied with bibliography, decolonisation overseen by a development department. The artist may howl provided she arrives on time, submits the correct JPEG and understands that Wendy Fisher’s A4 foundation logo must remain visible in the installation photographs.
I knew this machinery professionally. Then I began seeing it from inside the room.
I manage Tracey Rose’s studio, so in Bern I had the peculiar privilege of watching institutional reality split in two. First came the thing itself: the anxiety, the changing language, the work becoming a problem, the problem becoming something to be administratively disappeared. Then came the public version, months later, in which Kunstmuseum Bern insisted there had been “no censorship” and that Tracey had merely followed its advice not to show A Muster of Peacocks: THE SHOAH. Rose and her team called that account a “blatant lie”. My eyes rolled so violently into the back of my skull that for a second I experienced the clean ballistic clarity of having been executed at point-blank range with a Desert Eagle. There is gaslighting, and then there is being calmly informed that the event you witnessed has been replaced by a more convenient version.
The absurdity had started before the exhibition even opened. We arrived at the opening in Bern and found a statement issued in High German, affixed to the exhibition like an ideological customs declaration. We translated it and sat there wondering what the fuck we were reading. It announced, among other things, that Tracey condemned the Hamas attacks and supported the existence of both Israel and Palestine. The museum’s published statement also reproduced criticism of the 2021 Letter Against Apartheid that Rose had signed, including the claim that “apartheid” was being deployed as a political “fighting term” and that her position was therefore radical rather than constructive. To my knowledge, neither Tracey nor I had supplied this neat little certificate of political hygiene. Yet there it was: the artist explained, disinfected and returned to the public with the appropriate moral warning label attached.
And then came one of the stranger moments of my professional life: standing in Switzerland while a room of white Swiss Germans gravely instructed two South
Africans, including an artist whose practice has spent three decades chewing through the visual, psychic and political remains of apartheid, on the permissible use of the word apartheid. The irony was so complete it almost achieved sculptural form. Nobody possesses a hereditary monopoly on the interpretation of history, South Africans included, and the application of the apartheid framework to Israel and the occupied
Palestinian territories is fiercely contested. But one might reasonably expect a little humility before explaining the concept to people produced by the system that gave the fucking word its international meaning. Instead, we were treated to that exquisite.
European institutional manoeuvre in which expertise quietly becomes jurisdiction: thank you for your lived history, we will now explain its correct vocabulary back to you.
This is where the museum’s language became fascinating. Bern publicly described Tracey as a “radical voice” whose work confronts post-colonialism, racism and
apartheid. Wonderful. Put it on the poster. Print it in the press release. Radicality is gorgeous at 300 dpi. But once that radical voice entered a live political argument, the temperature changed. Suddenly the same artist required clarification, qualification, advice and institutional framing. You could feel the sphincters tightening. Another meeting. Another email. Another solemn invocation of context. A celebrated difficult artist had committed the unforgivable professional error of remaining difficult after the invitations had been printed.
That is what I cannot forget about Bern. Not disagreement. Disagreement is easy. Tracey can take disagreement. The work practically demands it. What remains
grotesque is the attempt to rewrite the conditions under which that disagreement occurred, to transform pressure into “advice”, removal into choice, and institutional fear into the serene language of process. The museum later said the decision remained Tracey’s; Rose says the work was removed without her knowledge or consent. Those are the two public accounts. I know which version corresponds to what I watched happen in front of me. I was not reading about it afterwards. I was in the fucking room.
This is the great privilege of television: whoever controls the schedule decides where the episode begins.
Previously, on Palestine: nothing.
Then 7 October. Roll titles.
Rose changes the channel.
This ugly Bern episode concerned A Muster of Peacocks: THE SHOAH. The work, made in 2012, contains the phrase “Stop the Muslim holocaust”. However, a joke
remained that was viciously depraved. The Hope I hope remained on display. Rose herself noted the irony. The work in which she stood at the separation barrier, played Hatikva and pissed against the concrete survived, while A Muster of Peacocks became the centre of the dispute. The word, ‘Holocaust’, was harder to digest than the piss.
Then came Bergen. I was there for that too.
By then I knew the atmospheric symptoms. If Hitler Was A Girl Who Went To Art School arrived, the final video was seen properly in the flesh, and something shifted. There was no censorship. Nobody forbade the work. Nobody removed it. It was subtler and, in some ways, more revealing than that. The enthusiasm simply drained out of the room. The work had been invited in theory; then people actually saw the fucking thing. You could almost hear the collective thought: Jesus Christ, I hope this somehow does not end up on the wall. Not opposition exactly. More the curious institutional condition of technically supporting a work while radiating the energy of somebody praying the projector develops a fatal electrical fault overnight.
Rose’s proposition is grotesque and intentionally so: Hitler rerouted through art school, history kicked sideways into the counterfactual, dictatorship made ridiculous through the possibility of the failed artist. The safe historical monster, embalmed by documentaries, memorial culture and schoolbooks, is dragged back into the indecent present. A title like that can perform extraordinary work before the crate has even been opened. By the time the finished video is playing in front of you, abstraction disappears. The artwork is no longer a proposal, a paragraph in an email or an exciting curatorial possibility. It is there. Loud, ugly, impossible to politely misunderstand. You can almost hear the administrative anus clench.
And this was Norway. Bergen is not Oslo, obviously, but Norway is hardly politically blank in relation to Israel and Palestine. The negotiations that became the Oslo Accords began through secret Israeli-Palestinian talks in Norway before the Declaration of Principles was signed in Washington in 1993. The subject had not been smuggled into some innocent Nordic paradise. History was already in the room, smoking out the window.
The work did make it onto the show. That matters. Bergen was not Bern, and I would not pretend otherwise. Nobody censored it. What stayed with me was the peculiar absence of appetite once the institution had fully encountered what it had invited. It is easy to be enthusiastic about difficult art while it remains hypothetical. Much harder once the difficult object is sitting in front of you, plugged in, rendered, exported and ready to play. That hesitation says something of its own. Not every form of institutional fear ends in prohibition. Sometimes it appears as delay, reluctance, lowered enthusiasm, the faint hope that logistics might somehow solve the moral problem for you.
Artists are capable of being wrong, vain, cruel, idiotic and occasionally all four before breakfast. Fear does not confer virtue, and discomfort does not amount to censorship. But an institution’s commitment to difficult art is tested precisely at the moment when the difficult work stops being a flattering idea and becomes an actual fucking artwork. Bergen showed me that gap very clearly: between liking the thought of Tracey Rose being dangerous and standing in front of the danger once she has finished the edit.
Bern was not an aberration. Bergen was not an aberration. They belong to the peculiar comedy of contemporary art, which has spent decades congratulating itself on its appetite for transgression while developing the digestive system of a nervous Guinea pig.
The museum commissions transgression. The biennale transports it. The gallery sells it. The fair puts it under flattering LEDs beside a donor with a microphone . Everyone adores the difficult artist once the difficulty has become archival. Yesterday’s obscenity is today’s masterpiece because the masterpiece no longer threatens to ruin dinner.
Dead controversy is culture. Living controversy is administration.
And so, rather unexpectedly, we arrive back in Johannesburg and at CENTRÅL.
CENTRÅL is not a heroic corrective to the museum. Christ, spare us another “alternative model”. The art world can convert a refusal into a symposium before lunch and a funding category before the end of the financial year. What Rose has found useful here is far less glamorous.
It is direct.
There is Tracey. There is me. There is Eric. There is Nabil. There is a room. There is work that has to go into it.
So we put the work into the room.
No curator whispers an interpretation to another curator who converts it into a proposal that reaches a committee which eventually returns to the artist bearing an improved version of what she apparently meant. No dealer checks whether the work might sour the collector’s mood. No fair worries about whether the politics will upset the booth. No institution needs to discover, with six weeks remaining before opening, that Tracey Rose has opinions. Tracey decides what Tracey wants to show. We make it possible.
This is not contempt for curating (although I often wonder what the point of this vile money sponge of a position actually accomplishes). Quite the opposite. It is curating stripped of its imperial fantasies and returned to care. Rose does not need somebody to explain Tracey Rose to Tracey Rose. If she wants the work projected, we work out the projection. If the wall has to be built, we build it. If something will not function, we say so and find another way.
Eric, Nabil and I are artists and technicians. That distinction matters because we know the miserable sensation of watching our work pass into another person’s custody and slowly cease to belong to us. We know what it is to be invited because somebody claims to respect what we make and then discover that we have somehow become the least authoritative person in the room about it.
So we follow a primitive rule: do not do that to another artist. Listen. Argue. Fix the cable. Move the wall. Find the projector. Hang the thing. Apparently this now constitutes a moral philosophy.
CENTRÅL does not possess the money, infrastructure, collection, conservation department or institutional reach of the museums through which Rose has moved. It has something much cheaper and, apparently, considerably harder to obtain: very little distance between the artist and the work. Artist, work, wall, observers/participants. Anybody else in the room should have a bloody good explanation for being there.
That is also why Omnibus begins to make sense. Taken separately, these works can be processed into incidents. A controversy here. An offensive phrase there. A scandal in one city, an administrative disagreement in another. Institutions are skilled at quarantining trouble. Put the works together and quarantine fails.
Ciao Bella. Waiting for God. The Hope I hope. Ol’ Jerusalem Pussy. If Hitler Was A Girl Who Went To Art School.
San Pedro keeps turning up like a television character the network cancelled three seasons ago but who refuses to die. Race, God, colonialism, sex, whiteness, nationalism, Israel, Palestine, fascism and the vulgar comedy of power all arrive through the same damaged transmitter.
This is why “retrospective” feels too clean. Retrospectives are often where dangerous work goes to collect its pension. The biography is settled. The outrage acquires an accession number. The wound becomes scholarship. The corpse is shampooed, catalogued and returned under controlled humidity.
But San Pedro keeps getting up.
Rose’s work has the indecency to remain contaminated by the present. 2001 leaks into 2005 infects everything after it. 2012 crashes into Bern. Bern stains Bergen. Bergen comes back to Johannesburg. The dates refuse to behave themselves because history refuses to behave itself.
Rose is not a prophet. Prophecy is too flattering and altogether too mystical. The work merely remembers longer than the people charged with administering it. It remembers that arguments existed before they became hashtags. It remembers that colonial power does not cease to be colonial because its spokespeople have learnt the vocabulary of democracy. It remembers that no nation-state becomes morally identical with the people living inside it. That distinction should not be difficult, yet an astonishing quantity of contemporary political discourse depends upon confusing the two.
Perhaps that is what San Pedro understood beside the wall. The wall was not the people. The anthem was not the people. The state was not the people.
And pissing on the wall was not pissing on the people.
That is why CENTRÅL will not clean the tape. The interference is the programme. SAN PEDRO V OMNIBUS is not a sanitised retrospective but an unauthorised rebroadcast of material that behaved badly the first time and has shown no inclination to improve.
There is no network executive hovering beside the switchboard. There is no tasteful disclaimer informing you that the views expressed in the following programme do not necessarily represent those of management.
There is barely management.
There is Tracey. There are three seemingly-foolish blind optimists trying to make sure the projector works. There is San Pedro, somewhere in the static, painted pink beside that wall with his guitar, waiting for God, waiting for history, waiting for the meeting to finish, waiting for the institution to decide which version of courage it can afford.
The camera keeps rolling. The piss keeps running. Do not adjust your set — the problem is not the signal.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled nation.
Normal programming will not resume.
TRACEY ROSE SAN PEDRO V OMNIBUS: U’R A NATION opens on Sunday, 4 October 2026, at CENTRÅL, Victoria Yards, 16 Viljoen Street, Lorentzville, Johannesburg
Adilson De Oliveira is a Johannesburg-born multidisciplinary artist, animator, and cultural practitioner whose work explores history, memory, and Luso-African identity through satire, technology, and decolonial critique. A Fine Arts graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, he began as a printmaker before shifting toward a practice that treats machines as creative collaborators. Since co-founding The Magolide Collective in 2019, De Oliveira has used media such as drawing, video, XR, and AI to challenge the Western art canon and blur the boundaries between truth and fiction. His work serves as both a resistance and an archive, capturing the complex realities of postcolonial South Africa.
