At a stage in contemporary South African art characterised by infighting - mutterings and fists flew in the build up to Africus; artists clashed with local government, curators clashed with bureaucrats and the press clashed along after them - Barker was perfectly poised to bring together his contemporaries.

The Laager - a circular art encampment created out of 14 12-meter shipping containers - would come to be regarded as the gem of the Biennale and much praise would be bestowed on Barker's curatorial instincts.

Writing about the 1995 Africus Biennale in an edition of Modern Painters, David Bowie discussed The Laager as "a symbol of nationalist isolation", suggesting that the irony of the show was that it exposed Africus itself to be a bit of a laager.

"What it does for me personally," he wrote, "is present the work of a bunch of wildly talented, young, mostly white artists dealing with the South African Thing... Wayne Barker, curator of this fringe event offers a deconstruction of the history of image in South Africa from 1930 to the present... "

The United Nations agreed with the pop star and offered backing for the show to be taken to Chile as a cultural exchange. What remains startling about The Laager is how in both its content and its presentation - a shipping container per artist - it pre-empted the 1997 Africus Biennale, which addressed issues of cultural identity around the theme of Trade Routes. Barker was about to set sail on a voyage of discovery across the seas. First, though, there was South Africa's own colonial history to reconsider.