UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Self-representation in the works of Busisiwe Nzama: An analysis of the Frida ‘little travellers’ and more: Material Narratives
No full textThe focus of this article is on ‘little travellers’, a form of figure making associated with Woza Moya, an arts and craft project based in Hillcrest, KwaZulu-Natal. This article tracks and analyses the creation of two variations of the Frida ‘little traveller’ created by a Woza Moya bead artist, Busisiwe Nzama, in partnership with the Director of the project, Paula Thomson. My data-gathering process was conducted over an eleven-month period of observations interspersed with conversations, photographing and interviews with the objective of deepening an understanding of the co-design and co-creation process between a stakeholder from the arts and craft non-governmental sector and societal practice partners. The study conducted found that an analysis of this process of partnership allows a deepened understanding of the historical realities of an individual expressed through beadworks. Some ‘little travellers’ by Nzama take their inspiration from the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. As with Kahlo, much of Nzama’s work is concerned with self-representation. While Nzama and Kahlo treat the subject of self-representation differently, both artists indicate ways in which the self becomes infused in a work of art. This aspect of the ‘little travellers’ conceptualisation enables me to explore the similarities between Nzama and Kahlo’s bodies of work
All that glitters is not gold: Counter penetrating in the name of Blackness and queerness, or, Athi-Patra Ruga’s camp act in the dirt
No full textIn this article I engage South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s artistic practice to flesh out the complexities that arise from the intersection of the terms Black and queer. Drawing on diverse historical, social and textual resources, I interpret Ruga’s dismantling of dominant post-apartheid and postcolonial narratives vis-à-vis a close reading of some of his provocative avatars. Ruga’s practices of staining, tainting and contaminating serve to expose the borders that produce conventional notions of race and gender. The article employs camp discourse in its allusion to performativity, displacement and artifice in order to 1) lay bare prevailing normative structures; and 2) dismantle conventional views of identity. To avoid being blindsided by camp’s flamboyance and ostentation, I propose a view that favours an intimate embroilment with dirt – a stance I argue may furnish camp acts with political intent and so help create a more sophisticated and comprehensive view on the juncture of Blackness and queerness. Relying on Ruga’s method of counter penetration as a way of fleshing out a hermeneutic view of Black queer subjectivity, I show how counter penetration in Ruga’s estimation is a subversive and transgressive act intent on contaminating and infecting conventional narratives of history, identity and politics
A study in purple: The Jacaranda city in postcards
Get PDFWhite settlement in the Pretoria region started in 1855, and this small market town on the periphery of the British Empire played an increasingly important role in South African politics as the capital of the Transvaal Republic and then as the administrative capital of the entire country after 1910. As the site of significant structures such as the Union Buildings and the Voortrekker Monument, for many years Pretoria symbolised apartheid rule and bureaucracy. Pretoria has therefore generally been seen as a conservative seat of power with strong Afrikaner affiliations. Moreover, although it housed many significant industries such as Iscor, Pretoria never attained the status of industry and commerce usually accorded Johannesburg. This article investigates some of the ways in which Pretoria was represented as both the attractive ‘Jacaranda city’ and as the seat of monolithic power and government in the pre-1994 years. Postcards are commonly produced for tourists and the so-called leisure class, but also serve to foster civic pride and ownership for the residents of cities. Postcards have helped to construct Pretoria’s identity by means of practices of representation than either select and showcase, or ignore and elide certain aspects of the city and its peoples. Despite small shifts in the visual language by which Pretoria has been represented, many postapartheid postcards perpetuate the clichés and fail to reflect the ‘reality’ of the city
Coming to terms with ‘the curatorial’ in PLAY_an exhibition
Get PDFThis article revisits observations pertaining to ‘the curatorial’ in order to come to terms with the informal exhibition setting and interactive thematic implementation of PLAY_an exhibition (2014). It is argued that curatorial insight can be addressed as a means to bridge the gap between the agenda of the curators as exhibitionmakers, and the artists who present works that are autonomous objects. Contemporary curating assumes a multidimensional and interconnected role, linking objects, images, people, and discourses. The curatorial thus requires flexibility, making allowances for constant revision through active research – positing the exhibition as open-ended, transformative, and fluid. The contemporary curator is the instigator for mediation, assuming an interventionist role through continued interaction with the artists, their works on exhibition, and the curatorial agenda. In revisiting PLAY it has become evident that the curatorial cannot be predetermined, and plays out supplementary to all aspects of curating research. The contemporary curator is required to exercise a dynamic approach and revise the original agenda of both exhibition format and autonomous art object in order to enhance the intended experience
Pippa Skotnes, Claim to the country: the archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd.
Get PDFThis is a book about empathy. It is a major achievement in terms of collaborative and research talents as well as being a brilliant and sensitive book design. In its focus and content, it vindicates the controversy garnered by Skotnes in her Miscast: negotiating the presence of the Bushmen, an installation and publication dating from 1996. This book focuses not so much on an interpretation of San beliefs or lifestyle, but rather on giving recognition to the research priorities of two very important and perhaps often overlooked figures. Wilhelm Bleek (1827-1875) and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd (1834- 1914) dedicated years of their lives to documenting and preserving San culture – from its languages to its mythology, philosophies, religion and histories. They did so not by ‘external’ academic research, but by conducting ‘internal’ fieldwork, housing displaced San individuals and gradually gaining insight into their language and culture. In Claim to the country, Skotnes proverbially looks over Lloyd’s shoulder and into the material she amassed. She does not do it singledhandedly, but with the scholarly back up of several wellknown practitioners in the related fields that manifest empathy for San culture
Countering stereotypes:The representation of Africans in Communist Party of South Africa Cartoons 1930-1936
Get PDFThe construction of racial difference as a strategy to legitimise colonialism and imperialism in Africa found expression in a visual tradition of racist representations of Africans. Numerous studies have been conducted into this visual tradition, especially with regard to popular cultural forms such as ‘ethnic’ shows (Shephard 1986), exhibitions (Hodeir 2002), advertising (McClintock 1995; Burke 2002), comics (Hunt 2002), photography and film (Richards 1986; Mirzoeff 1998; Landau 2002) and in popular culture in general (Pieterse 1992; Grinker & Steiner 1999). These studies make it clear that significant energy and resources were invested in the wide distribution to large audiences of colonialist and imperialist propaganda and associated racist imagery
“... if Black girls had long hair”
Get PDFIn his book entitled The African origin of civilisation: myth or reality? (1974), the Senegalese intellectual Cheikh Anta Diop makes the observation that, ‘The whole aspect of the world would be changed if Black girls had long hair’. I did not think about the full implication of this statement until a student in one of my classes asked why Diop could assert that the pharaohs of Egypt were black when in the images he knew of them, they did not have “Afros”. Thus began my search for images and histories of black hair. Never would I have imagined that this research would be relevant outside of my seminar course called “African civilisations”. When the students at the Pretoria High School for Girls ignited a conversation about hair and its regulation by schools in August 2016, my already prepared presentation was converted into a written lecture, and I attempted – through the use of archival images and video clips – to answer the seemingly simple question “what is black hair?” I was puzzled by the problematic question of what kind of historical evidence hair is.
In this article, I consider the volatility of the subject of black hair. I begin with Diop’s counterfactual and consider the “unfinished” project of black modernity through the politics of hair and hairstyling. I end with the “hair story” as a new mode – enabled by YouTube, vlogging and other social media – through which young black women particularly, express their rejection of the conformity that is often implied in social and written regulations of their hair
Hair-stylisation and the “Art-ofliving”: the case of Tendai Huchu’s The hairdresser of Harare
Get PDFIn this article, I consider the portrayal of hair and hair-stylisation in Tendai Huchu’s novel, The hairdresser of Harare (2010) as powerful tropes that communicate the ‘the Art-of-living’ (Veenhoven 2003) and human flourishing. I take a different route from the conventional tradition in which hair-stylisation is seen as site of struggle and contestation, and, by extension, is laden with insinuations of race (Tate 2009; Erasmus 2000). Rather, I argue that hair-stylisation is an expressive genre that conveys meaning to and of the self, the immediate community and the global world. As a form of an extension of clothing, hair styles have the capacity to carry messages that enrich the self in various spaces of dialogue, be they religious, social or political. Conversely, hair styles can also signal the forbearance of sturdy individualism. I explore the centrality of the self, the image, and the body’s articulation in various modes. Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (1998) theory of ‘cosmopolitan patriots’, I argue that through hair-stylisation processes, black and white women presented in The hairdresser of Harare demonstrate the individual capacity to introspect, relate and share “the good life” and versions of human flourishing in a multi-ethnic environment. They extend Ruut Veenhoven’s (2003) concept of the “Art-of-living”, or ‘the capabilities of leading a good life’ (Veenhoven 2003:373) to embrace the global visual and aesthetic images typified by black American actresses and singer-songwriters such as Halle Berry and Toni Braxton. Hair-stylisation enables the female characters in Huchu’s text to defeat and rezone time-space distantiation, and transfigure themselves into what I interpret as ‘citizens of the world’ (Appiah 1998). However, in the process, female characters do not necessarily forgo cultural particularities, and this motivates for local cosmopolitanism – a state in which they celebrate the presence of people different to them, and enjoy the pleasures of hybridity as they relate to the global world
The Arrivants
Get PDFFirst, I feel the dark, then the cold. The underground, black-walled space below the main FADA gallery is crypt-like in midwinter. Or perhaps I am underwater. As the three acts or tableaux of Christine Checinska’s The Arrivants unfold around me, I come to feel that I am swimming through semi-conscious and buried memories, from an individual and collective history. These surface through Checinska’s trawling and deployment of cloth, stitch, text and oral testimony
Editorial Space, Ritual, Absence: the liminal in South African visual art
Get PDFThis eclectic and yet closely related set of articles were first presented as papers at a colloquium held at the University of Johannesburg, from 10 to 11 March 2011. The colloquium was convened by James Sey, Leora Farber and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen under the auspices of the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre of the Art, Design and Architecture Faculty of the University of Johannesburg. In conjunction with a visual art exhibition of the same title, curated by Sey and Farber, colloquium presenters sought to interrogate the well-known trope of liminality in terms of its usefulness as a frame within which to understand and analyse South African visual art