A radically compressed figure grips two upright poles at the edges of the composition. Head, hands and torso are present, but the lower body seems to have been cut away. The poles may be bars, supports or instruments of balance; whatever their identity, they organise the figure’s world as confinement.

Colour is used with unusual intensity. Red, green, yellow and turquoise articulate the mask-like head and hands, while the torso remains grey and wounded. Rather than relieving the subject’s severity, colour heightens its estrangement. The prisoner becomes at once body, emblem and constructed object.

Made during Feni’s London exile, the drawing forms part of his recurring Prisoner series. Its historical ground is unmistakably South African – detention without trial, banning, political imprisonment and constrained movement were basic mechanisms of apartheid power. Yet exile changes the work’s temporal structure. South Africa is simultaneously present experience, political emergency and a place recoverable only through memory.

This tension keeps the work sharply contemporary. Its body can speak to carceral states, border regimes and the treatment of migrants and political detainees without losing its specific relationship to apartheid. Feni does not universalise suffering by erasing history; he uses historical experience to expose a recurring technology of dehumanisation.