UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Body, light, interaction, sound: A critical reading of a recent installation of Willem Boshoff’s Kykafrikaans
Full text linkIn this article, I explore the use of digital presentation strategies in a recent installation of Kykafrikaans by Willem Boshoff. In relation to a dominant metaphor of our time, the notion that digital information is disembodied, I take a critical stance on two key elements of the installation, namely, the digital projection of images and the broadcast of recorded sounds. I discuss these framing elements both in relation to themes of disembodiment, as may be found in the installation and in terms of the conventional reception of this work in print and book forms as embodie
Editorial
Full text linkThe perennial desire to drive home the imperative of design for social good is reinforced by the first article in this edition of the journal. In the article The VHEMBE filter: a product for rural South Africa, authors Angus Campbell and Martin Bolton document a South African design project that focused on an intervention aimed at social upliftment and the impact the outcome could offer a very large segment of society through improved water quality. The article illustrates how a user-centred approach was employed to improve an existing product, the Filtron water filter, to ensure that it was better suited to users living in rural settings. The development of the resulting design, named the Vhembe water filter, formed part of a larger collaborative research project that aimed to investigate whether an intervention that improves water quality would measurably improve the health of people using the intervention. Research data was based on field work conducted in approximately 25 rural villages in the Vhembe district of the Limpopo Province, South Africa
Dress as a site of multiple selves: Address and redress in Judith Mason’s The Man who Sang and the Woman who Kept Silent and Wanja Kimani’s You Have Not Changed
Full text linkIn this article, I explore dress as mediator or interface through which multiple surfacings of the self are activated. I examine the types of address that artists Judith Mason and Wanja Kimani make through the motif of a dress, focusing on Mason’s triptych, The Man who Sang and the Woman who Kept Silent (1998) and Kimani’s installation series, You Have Not Changed (2012-2014). I suggest that the artists negotiate personal sufferings by way of dress as both address, and an act of redress. I argue that the dress in each artist’s work is a site of tension where narratives of artist, addressee and viewer come into play. I put forward a personalised approach to analysing dress and the stories it surfaces, instead of understanding it in terms of the macro-political (gendered, cultural, racial and socio-economic) identities it might evoke. This strategy is introduced with reference to Julie Botticcello’s (2009:132) notion that, ‘the nuances of identification in dress’ are lost when ‘a focus on the macro-politics of dressing’ is maintained. I critique the limits of Barbara Russell’s (2006:179) reading of Mason’s blue dress as a signifier of femininity. Instead, I demonstrate the subtle manner in which Mason uses the dress as an address and act of redress to herself, rendering it a ‘web of narratives’ through which many ‘tales’ are ‘told’ (Benhabib cited by Coullie, Meyer, Ngwenya & Olver 2006:3). I carry this idea through to an analysis of Kimani’s series and consider the personal and collective encounters that emanate from her dress. I contrast the manner in which Kimani’s dress resonates with collective experiences of the African diaspora to Sarah Kaiser’s and Sarah McCullough’s (2010:363) approaches to the diaspora through dress. Regarding dress with reference to the selves that each artist surfaces, I offer a fresh understanding of what seems to have become a tired interpretation of the macro-politics of dress
Snapshots of freedom: Street photography in Cape Town from the 1930s to the 1980s
Full text linkIn this article, I look at the “ordinary” (or “everyday”) archive of the racially oppressed, viewing it as an entry point into apartheid afterlives, while arguing for a rethinking of humanness and freedom after racial oppression. I consider the photographs produced by “Movie Snaps” – a street photographic studio of Cape Town, South Africa, that operated between the 1930s and the 1980s – and suggest that looking to previously marginalised narratives can offer insight into larger questions of self-representation, belonging and freedom. The contents of this article are based on a larger research project on forced removals in Cape Town, out of which several exhibitions and two documentary films have been produced to date
Interstices and thresholds: the liminal in Johannesburg as reflected in the video programme, the Underground, the Surface and the Edges
Full text linkA former gold-mining camp whose acquisition of the aesthetic markers of a metropolis was almost instantaneous, the city of Johannesburg can be represented, economically and philosophically, as geographically plural. The dialectic between the surface life of the city and its wealth-deriving underground spaces, and the concomitant activation of a third, liminal, space, namely, ‘the edges’, characterises ‘the African modern of which Johannesburg is the epitome’ (Nuttall & Mbembe 2008:17). We examine the relationships between these urban spatialities as they are articulated in a programme of selected video artworks curated by the authors that take the city of Johannesburg as their subject matter, source material or provenance. In the article, we pay attention to how the uses and meanings of these spatialities may have shifted, or failed to shift, between their constructions in apartheid-era and contemporary, post-apartheid South Africa.
We propose that the underground, the surface and the edges are at once identifiable modalities that emerge coherently in the selected works and interconnected inflections of a singular urban phenomenon. Building on this, we observe that the dialectic between the underground and the surface in Johannesburg contains echoes of the literary and artistic tropes of burial and resurrection, and in support of this observation, employ Jacques Derrida’s (1994:xvii) notions of “hauntology”, in which he considers the spectral or ghostly as that which ‘happens’ only between two apparently exclusive terms, such as ‘life and death’. In considering “Johannesburg” as a metropolitan phenomenon in the selection of works discussed, we speak of a spectral, interstitial realm that exists in-between the strata of surface (the stratum of life, goodness, health and visibility) and underground (a catacomb where the dead, the corrupt and the ailed are hidden). We thus offer a view of being-in-Johannesburg in which inhabiting takes place in liminal spaces – or in-passage between – fluid spatial terms, wherein constant mediation takes place
Liminality, absence and silence in the installation art of Jan van der Merwe
Full text linkIn this article, I interpret specific examples of the installation art of South African artist Jan van der Merwe in terms of notions regarding liminality, focusing on the concepts of absence and silence, or the “nothingness” inherent in space and time, and in language. I argue that in the works chosen for analysis, Van der Merwe foregrounds liminal space and time as productive of nothingness. This conception of liminality (relating to its inherent nothingness) is explored in terms of Martin Heidegger’s (1962; 2006) thoughts on the spatial aspect of time
Bearing the lightness of being: the 54th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition, Venice, Italy, 2011
Full text linkILLUMInations, the title of the 54th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition, sparks a number of associations relating to art production and contemporary politics. As a whole, the word implies a kind of spiritual or intellectual enlightenment, which is reinforced through the accentuation of the first part of the word. The notion of light is a classical theme in art, commencing with the Illuminated manuscripts produced by monks during the twelfth century – an attempt to illuminate the masses by bringing them Christianity – to the philosophical interpretation of light during the Age of Enlightenment – the surge of scientific discovery and reason that ultimately fuelled later inventions such as the light bulb. The Modern period was ushered in through the development of photography – a means of inscribing a fragment of reality onto paper with light – which, in turn, rendered naturalistic representation obsolete and prompted artistic experiments with light as it became the subject of numerous Impressionist canvases.
Layers of woundedness in Inxeba Masculinities disrupted, denied and defamed
Full text linkIn this paper, we discuss the multi-layered representations of masculinities as they appear in the film Inxeba. Reading these multi-layered representations against a backdrop of the initiation practice of ulwaluko highlights the significance of heteronormativity in defining and engaging critical African Black masculinities in South Africa today. This is further compounded through the intersecting nuances of race and class configurations that matter for how contemporary Black masculinities are constructed. We argue that Inxeba’s successes and failures of representation bring to the fore intricate debates and ethical dilemmas of representation in the arts and social sciences more generally. In addition, if Inxeba fails in its (mis)representation of ulwaluko as less than a complex, nuanced and rich cultural practice, it is arguably successful in its exploration of the deeply entrenched heteronormative socio-material and psychical space of this practice
Coda: 2018, Still struggling with a pair of shoes bought in 1996?
Full text linkTradition and culture hold South African queers captive. South Africa, with perhaps one of the most progressive constitutions in the world is, in Gastrow’s view, acknowledged for fostering ideas of democracy and equality across the continent
To Make See and to Let Die: Photography and testimony
Full text linkThe focus of this article is a speculative argument on the relation between photography and testimony as one that situates the viewer on a particularly powerless, but responsibility-laden position. Articulating Nilufër Demir’s viral 2015 photograph of Aylan Kurdi, and Walter Kleinfeldt’s 1918 photograph of an unknown fallen soldier, as images bearing the marks of shifts in biopolitics, the article takes up on Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Georges Didi-Huberman and Giorgio Agamben, and reflects upon the possibility of addressing and responding to images beyond a moral level. As such, it inquires on the need to relate to images on a level that considers power relations. Ultimately showing that observers, or viewers, of photographs are necessarily tied to the unfolding of human history, no matter how distant they may be from its events, the article proposes a response to the need of assuming a political stance when facing images