UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Do not make Africa an object of exploitation again
Full text linkThis article aims to present the audience reception of Black Panther by an Afro-Brazilian public. It raises questions about the autonomous appropriation of the film’s messages by an Afro-Brazilian diasporic community. It also questions the construction of a black identity, present and future, linked to an apparent rediscovery of the African continent by the global cultural industry. The theoretical framework is Afrofuturism. The methodology is audience reception studies as well as thematic content analysis
Guernicas – A Commentary on the South African Condition Review of Post-apartheid Guernica (10 October 2021 – 30 January 2022)
Full text linkLate last year, I went to the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) – a space that I had never visited prior to going to see Sharlene Khan and Mokgabudi Amos Letsoalo’s Post-apartheid Guernica (10 October 2021 – 30 January 2022). Getting into the space was both interesting and overwhelming, as the JAG is situated in a very busy part of Johannesburg – one that is teeming with life, people who are trying to get by with the little means they have, and a palpability of the disenfranchisement that is abided owing to the history of our country. I refer to the geographical location of the JAG, owing to the commentary that the work of the artists is making on the conditions of life in post-apartheid South Africa. What the reader who is familiar with the decolonial tradition will note are the implications that the exhibition had for the context that defines the gallery space where it was curated and displayed. In the first instance, there is a sense that even as things have changed for the majority, with respect to our participation in the socio-political decision making of the country through universal franchise, there continues to be despair and hopelessness for the majority who would like to claim South Africa as home
Memorials, landscape and white masculinity: dialogic interventions in South African art: Challenging Legacies in Post-Colonial and Post-Socialist Notions of Place
No full textThe memorialisation of place and representation of land and landscape is topical in many societies that are dealing with the aftermath of political trauma, such as Post-Colonial or Post-Soviet countries. In such contexts, artists engage with land and notions of place through processes of memorialisation and landscape representation, or very often, the undoing of these traditions as they were entrenched by regimes that are now redundant. In this article we investigate two different artistic agendas that engage with such sites in South Africa, in the work of Paul Emmanuel, and the collective Avant Car Guard. Though separated by a decade, the artworks discussed here share a dialogic engagement with existing memorial sites, or indeed, traditions that memorialise settler belonging, such as the landscape painting tradition or military equestrian monuments. While Emmanuel’s work may be understood to employ a dialogic, anti-monumental strategy in response to the statue of Louis Botha at the Union buildings in Tshwane in South Africa, Avant Car Guard insert themselves in spaces where they engage parodically with memorial sites and the tradition of landscape representation. In both cases, white masculinity is called into question through self-representation, engaging with notions of Afrikaner hegemony and white anxiety
Special section editorial: Art, access and agency - art sites of enabling
No full textIt is our sincere pleasure and privilege to introduce the reader to this special edition of Image & Text—‘Art, Access and Agency - art sites of enabling’. The collection of articles and interviews contained herein serves as the outcome of the three-day conference-event, ‘Art, Access and Agency - art sites of enabling’, presented over two years ago on 7-9 October 2021 by the School of the Arts in collaboration with the Transformation Directorate, University of Pretoria. Since then, it has taken many patient hours to transcribe, edit, peer review and otherwise transform the many varied presentations that formed the basis of the conference-event into its present textual format. We are pleased to present the results to readers and introduce them to the thoughts and ideas that underpin the project as a whole. In what follows, we briefly describe the process of conceptualising the project, outline the overall research question and sub-questions and describe the processes of its implementation and methodologies at stake therein. We also briefly introduce the many varied scholarly responses to the research project and show how they align with the project’s particular vision
Exhibition Review: Art, access and agency - art sites of enabling
No full textThe group exhibition You don’t say, is based around a third-year Fine Arts project completed at the University of Pretoria under the guidance and teachings of Johan Thom in collaboration with the South African conceptual artist Willem Boshoff. The works of other year groups, ranging from second-year to Master’s level, also form part of the exhibition as a way to broaden the conversation across different levels of students and their relative perspectives. The exhibition included more than twenty selected individual young artists\u27 works shown alongside three related works of art by Boshoff: Ash (2018), Elm (2021), and Oak (2021)
Spectre and Speculation: Haunting and Uncanniness in Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree by Niq Mhlongo: Decolonising Speculative Fiction
No full textNiq Mhlongo’s collection of short stories, Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree (2018), does not perhaps immediately present itself as speculative fiction. The collection, however, gives the supernatural world of African indigenous knowledge as much weight in shaping characters’ lives and experiences as it does contemporary socio-political realities. It troubles established genre distinctions in that it can be seen as a work simultaneously belonging to magical realism, social realism, and horror. This article contends that it is precisely owing to the work’s use of supernatural and uncanny aspects that this collection can be viewed as a form of social or sociological realism, which aims at depicting the peculiar contemporary and subjective (sur)realities of many young black South Africans. It is faithful to the contradictory worlds of tradition and globalisation that many South Africans straddle, as well as to the spectres of colonialism and Apartheid, that impinge on the present in both material and immaterial forms. In many ways the collection stages the difficulty of decolonisation and the subjective spectres and doppelgängers that such a process unleashes. This paper will make use of the work of Sigmund Freud, Avery F. Gordon, Eve Tuck and C. Ree to explore instances of haunting and the uncanny in Mhlongo’s collection
‘Untold stories’: The relationship of word and image in the work of Shaun Tan: Original Research
No full textPrimarily known as a children’s book author and illustrator, Shaun Tan has repeatedly resisted this label and rather positioned himself between the fields of literature and fine art, emphasising that his training and primary interest are in the latter. This essay approaches Tan’s work via his idea of ‘untold stories’, articulated in the eponymous section of his book The bird king and other sketches (2011) and in the 2018 solo exhibition at Beinart Gallery in Melbourne, Untold tales. Untold essentially means unpremeditated in Tan’s vocabulary and relates to his evocation of Paul Klee’s idea of ‘taking a line for a walk’. Using his idea of untold stories as my central point, the essay foregrounds the untold critical story of Tan as a fine artist, focusing in particular on works that have received minimal to no critical attention: his 2015 series of paintings Go, said the bird, his 2003 public mural The hundred year picnic, and his ongoing 9x5 inch series of observational works in the tradition of the Heidelberg School of Australian Impressionism. The latter is a particularly strong and formative influence on Tan’s career as a painter, allowing for a discussion of his work in the broader context of postcolonial art history and settler colonialism
Horror and beauty: Processing trauma through creative action in the work of Alexis Preller: Original Research
No full textIn a radio interview in 1964, South African artist Alexis Preller spoke about being able to visualise beauty while undergoing horrifying experiences. The examples that stimulated his imagination in this way were the volcanic eruption he witnessed in the Belgian Congo in 1939 and his experiences as an army medical orderly during WWII. Preller processed these unsettling, traumatic, and extreme experiences throughout his career as a professional artist using the creative action of painting to regain a state of personal emotional equilibrium.
In this article, I draw on underutilised sources that record Preller’s recollections and those of his one-time partner, Christi Truter, which provide valuable psychological insights into the artist’s work. I apply psychoanalyst Sophia Richman’s theory of creative action as an instrument for confronting and transcending severe trauma to a discussion of some of Preller’s paintings produced in the 1940s after his return to civilian life. In the safe space of his studio, his work facilitated a dissociated state of consciousness, or what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi terms a “flow” experience, which enabled him to witness, transform, externalise, and transcend trauma, promoting recovery, giving meaning to the past, and reconnecting his personal life narrative
How Jacaranda rain – a South African story was written
Full text linkThis is an account of how I went about writing my book of memoirs Jacaranda rain – a South African story. Several things immediately spring to mind when asked, ‘How did you go about writing this book’? Foremost is the fact that every person who picks up a pen, stylus, writing implement, or lays their hands on a typewriter or computer no doubt has a different and personal reason, aim, or motive for doing so
Editorial
Full text linkThis issue marks twenty years of Image & Text. It is therefore appropriate that it opens with a Foreword by Jacques Lange, one of the founding members of the journal. In ‘Foreword. Evaluation, reflection, comment and analysis: Twenty years of Image & Text’, Lange gives his personal views on the origins and development of the journal and highlights its contributions. What Lange shows in admirable detail is that although Image & Text has been influenced by disciplinary and stylistic fads, it has also kept pace with the demands of international scholarship and has established itself as a reputable journal.