UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Human-Nature-Technology interfaces within the Avatar cinema-scape
Full text linkTraditional relational models prefer Humanity as colonising the eco- and technolandscapes, distinguishing Humanity as Self, and Nature and Technology as Other. However, this essentialist view is challenged through regarding them as an open network of collaborative potential. Posthumanist works, such as Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, have promoted this potential, and popular filmmakers such as James Cameron have followed suit in integrating posthumanist philosophy into their work. Cameron’s hypothesis regarding the potential of Human-Nature- Technology interfacing is offered in his film, Avatar (Cameron 2009).
Where Cameron’s previous films tend towards an essentialist view of the feminine being more connected with Nature and Humanity, and the masculine with Technology, in Avatar, he is conflicted. He wants to promote bio-conservatorship through perpetual Human-Nature-Technology interfacing, but also wants to honour a common storytelling imperative to favour a single, masculine protagonist as saviour and relegating the feminine, Nature and Technology as serving a masculine agenda. Though Cameron does, upon closer scrutiny, present a masculine protagonist that does not subscribe to Self-Other, active-passive binaries, he does default towards an essentialist stance in resolving his story. However, the film does act as a catalyst for debate between essentialist and posthumanist views, where Cameron offers Humanity, Nature and Technology as symbiotic potentials alongside antonymous absolutes
Occupying Space: Land art and the Red Power Movement, c. 1965-78: Challenging Legacies in Post-Colonial and Post-Socialist Notions of Place
No full textScholars of Land art have long acknowledged the influence of pre-Columbian Indigenous art on earthworks made in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, identifying this appropriation as an extension of modernism’s preoccupation with “primitivism”. Less attention has been paid to the temporal and ideological parallels between Land art and the Red Power movement – a historic moment in Indigenous American rights activism that comprised a series of highly publicised protests and land occupations at sites like Alcatraz Island, Wounded Knee, and Mount Rushmore. As this wave of activism intensified and brought issues of land ownership and the legacy of settler colonialism to the forefront of the American public’s concerns, a number of non-Native artists began working with land as their primary material. By situating a selection of works by artists Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim within the historical framework of Red Power – including media representations of activists and countercultural appropriations of Indigenous American traditions – another social lens emerges through which to interpret these iconic works of Land art. The issues of displacement, territorial borders, and trespassing that emerge in Heizer’s and Oppenheim’s works take on new meaning when considered in relation to Red Power activists’ interrogation of broken historic treaties and demands for the return of stolen lands
Trauma and the Scottish Gàidhealtachd – Contemporary artistic responses to the Highland Clearances: Challenging Legacies in Post-Colonial and Post-Socialist Notions of Place
No full textThe historical event known as “The Highland Clearances” is a term broadly used to describe the forced evictions of Scottish crofters and their families. Whether through dispossession, or through migration due to economic circumstances, the changes undergone between 1750–1860 in the Gàidhealtachd (Gaeldom) have been represented in visual culture by a number of artists, with scholarship largely focused on painters of the Victorian period such as Thomas Faed RSA and John Watson Nicol. This paper seeks to place an emphasis on the efforts made in the last few decades by those in traditional Gàidhealtachd areas to reassess this legacy. As we approach the 40th anniversary of the landmark exhibition and publication As an Fhearann (From the Land), this paper focuses in particular on the work of An Lanntair Arts Centre in Stornoway, and the practice of an artist descended from an evicted family, Will Maclean RSA. The dif ficult issue of victimhood and the Gàidhealtachd, its relation to post-colonial narratives, and the changing nature of discourse around the Clearances are also discussed
embodied-enTAnglements/ enTAngled-embodiments performaTIVe encounters with materials, creative process, and the artist-woman’s body: Corporeality / Sensoriality / Materiality: Body-centered interpretations of South African art
No full textThis article explores the changing role of the audience within aesthetic encounters. It is framed within a shift in the nature of these encounters away from the primacy of vision, and towards experiential encounters within the body of the audience. I approach the article as self-reflexive autoethnography, assuming dual roles: in the first place as maker, and then describing my heightened bodily response as audience or experiencer to an immersive constellatioN of forms I made. In the next section, I unpack how experiential aesthetic encounters of this type unseTTle and disorientate traditional understandings of material forms and aesthetic relationships. Meaning is no longer situated within visual representation, but is made rather in situ and in actu within the subjective embodied experience of the experiencer who becomes part of the artwork. The final section recognises the porosity of boundaries between the subject and object, observer and observed, and artist and audience through exploration of the enTAngled relationship between the experiencer, my creative labour as the maker, and the vitalised materials that constitute my constellatioN.
I conclude by showing how creative proceSSes have unique power to mobilise experiential materiality in a way that establishes an embodied coNNection within the body of the receptive experiencer. This embodied coNNection enables a reorientation from head-based intellectual analysis, Cartesian binaries and focus on visual representation. By activating the whole-body of the experiencer and the embodied coNNection between audience-maker-artform, possibilities are generated for expanding and deepening interhuman relations, thereby signalling a return to forms of knowledge produced from and by the body
Flowers, sex, labour and loss: Art, access and agency - art sites of enabling
No full textTranscript of the keynote conversation between Willem Boshoff and Olu Oguibe at the Art, Access and Agency – Art Sites of Enabling Conference hosted by the University of Pretoria’s School of the Arts and the University of Pretoria’s Transformation Directorate from 7-9 October 2021. The conversation is introduced and moderated by Johan Thom
Re-claiming the lost home: The politics of nostalgia and belonging in women\u27s art practices in the Middle East: Hitting home: representations of the domestic milieu in feminist art
No full textIn recent years, discourses on migration and movement have been featured prominently in contemporary art and curatorial practices. For example, during the past decade, the migration crisis was a central theme for several pavilions at the Venice Biennale. Considering current developments, understanding critical issues regarding the migratory experience is a matter of urgency. This article addresses the issue of how the migratory experience is articulated in the works of women artists who use domestic objects to create uncanny environments that represent their contested homelands. This article also emphasises women’s experiences, as women have frequently been marginalised from official histories. Through visual analysis of the works, a new perspective is gained in understanding women artists’ strategies when representing their home in exile, and their homeland (both ‘lost’ and existing). The discussion unpacks projects that use ‘un-homely devices’ to re-construct the experience of ‘home’: home as a site of personal and family histories, and home as the place of danger and distress. It will specifically examine the work of Klitsa Antoniou, Lia Lapithi, Raeda Saadeh, and Andrea Shaker, all of whom have challenged in their practice the concepts of ‘home’, ‘exile’, and ‘belonging’
Joanna Rajkowska’s Rhizopolis (2021): A rhizomatic refugium for caring commons: Hitting home: representations of the domestic milieu in feminist art
No full textThinking with Joanna Rajkowska’s project Rhizopolis (2021), conceived as an underground habitat for species that survived a series of cataclysms, this essay reimagines the home as a collective space for communities of care, generative of accountability, co-dependencies, and co-responsibilities. The installation created from tree stumps and their roots is a futuristic scenography for a non-existent science fiction film. It invites reflection on if and how interspecies symbiotic bonds can be fostered to account for co-nutrition, co-growth and co-existence for all bodies—human, non-human and other-than-human. Within the overarching framework of ethics of care and feminist new mater i a list discourse foregrounding co-existence and making entanglements, the essay engages with Rhizopolis to interrogate an alternative domestic space. Does Rajkowska offer us a model for a communal transspecies refugium guided by love, care, and respect? The artist’s hypothetical scenario has transformative potential, imagining a home hospitable to all bodies post Anthropocene
Inside The Red Mansion: Füsun Onur’s world of objects, care relations, and art: Hitting home: representations of the domestic milieu in feminist art
No full textThe Red Mansion, or Hayri Onur Yalısı, acquired by the artist’s family in the 1930s, has been home to the Turkish sculptor and installation artist Füsun Onur and her sister İlhan for almost her entire life. It has a significant place in the artist’s career as it houses not only her life, studio, and archive, but also the affectionately preserved mementoes of her mother. In this article, we explore the role of the Red Mansion and its concentrated materiality in Füsun’s art and her relations with objects, her family, and her sister İlhan. We examine four of her artworks, which we argue are based on collaborative creativity and mutual care: Dollhouse (1970s), Counterpoint with Flowers (1982), The Dream of Abandoned Furniture (1985), and Once Upon a Time (2022). The interdisciplinary theoretical framework of our analysis draws upon care studies, family sociology, object-oriented ontology, and psychoanalysis. We propose that the Red Mansion and the objects therein are deeply connected to the artist’s unique understanding of home and family, which defines her work, evoking a c aring world that values humans and nonhumans alike
Visiting Hannah Arendt: Reflections on the civic affordances of storytelling in design education: Stories Worth Telling - crafting stories through the art of design
No full textIn this article, I consider the role of storytelling as a civic act, which is made visible through a reflection on the storytelling processes that informed the underpinning of a curriculum project showcased during the Stories Worth Telling exhibition (2023). To this end, I focus on how the stories worth telling are shaped, archived, and celebrated through participatory engagements and experiences by fourth-year Information Design students at the University of Pretoria. Underscored by Hannah Arendt’s notion that storytelling serves as a bridge between the private and public realms, I highlight the civic affordances of the storytelling process that may ultimately augment the students’ critical thinking and not only their technical design capabilities
Exhibition Review: Stories Worth Telling - crafting stories through the art of design
No full textIt is seldom a good thing to blow one’s own horn, but since this accomplishment is mine only by association with my creative colleagues in the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria, I think I am, so to speak, duty-bound to report on this: There is a vibrant new exhibition space in Pretoria. And the humble name of UP Student Gallery should not lower the expectations. In 2023 alone, UP Student Gallery not only hosted excellent exhibitions by the Fine Art students at the University of Pretoria, but also several others by professional artists which were truly world-class