[3] Growing up in the highly conservative atmosphere of Pretoria in the 70s could in some ways be seen as a catalyst and contributing factor to Barker's particularly rebellious and aggressive attack on that exact conservatism.

After his short tenure at the SANDF, and having practiced for a period of time, Barker went on to pursue an honorary postgraduate degree in Fine art at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles, France in 1998,[1] all the while creating and adding to a body of work that has maintained its social and political relevance in his home country and abroad.

The first major controversy and also the event that catapulted Barker into the public eye centred on the 1990 Standard Bank National Drawing Competition in which he had entered a highly unresolved and hurried work under the African name of Andrew Moletsi.

As a result, the Moletsi work was shortlisted, where Barker's was not, highlighting the biased, racially motivated judging systems that controlled the selection process.

[citation needed] Barker's Famous International Gallery (FIG) was a turning point in the exhibition of South African contemporary art throughout its existence from 1989 to 1995.

Many of these artists eventually rose to prominence, including Kendell Geers, Minette Vari, Barend De Wet, and Stephen Cohen.

[3] In 1993, a year after the end of the Mozambican Civil War, Barker created a large scale installation piece at the Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg entitled Coke Adds Life.

The exhibition spoke to the notion of the object on one level, with regards to the latex gloves and their contents – nothing gets lost in the universe, only found under a different set of circumstances, with a particular history and patina attached to it.

On another level, the haunting portraits that made up Zelbst spoke to a different sort of sensitivity not wholly unconnected to that shown by the latex glove objects.

These were critical of representation, a moment frozen in time, transformed through photography into objects, not dissimilar to the toy guns, pipes and coffee filters found on the streets of Frankfurt.

In this way, Barker became the ultimate flaneur, a collector of lived experience, pursuing the idea that history does not forget, and that nothing gets lost in the universe.

Taking the work of the Afrikaner nationalist landscape artist, J.H Pierneef (1886–1957), Barker began to disseminate what remains to this day a highly contested issue in South Africa – land, colonialism and ownership.

The 'propaganda' Barker speaks of lay in Pierneef's deliberate omission of the existence of any sort of black presence, and his subtle conviction that the magnificent landscapes depicted were the God-given right of the Afrikaner.

[1] Barker remains a prolific and active figure in the South African contemporary art sphere, exhibiting regularly with high-profile galleries as well as newer, up and coming ones.