Unlocking identities in globalising South African art (original) (raw)
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Unlocking identities in globalising South African art 1
2009
It is fair to maintain that every world construction, also a “world” of learning such as a tertiary institution, is blueprinted in some form of ideology. The lecture halls at a large university such as the University of Pretoria also speak about this expanding cultural horizon and it is not uncommon to have a class where there are students from Korea, Zimbabwe and Namibia mingling with a range of South African ethnicities. The picture now is very different from the picture of years ago when South African universities were predominantly “white” as a result of the ideological patterns of the time.
‘Identity’ reflected in South African art
This essay argues that South African art holds a unique position when addressing ‘identity’, as a result of its racially divided past. Referring to relevant theoretical discourse I will trace back international developments and reflect on the way in which they affect our local situation.
Journal of Student Affairs in Africa, 2019
In 2014, through the University of the Free State's (UFS) Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice (IRSJ), three South African universities partnered to collaborate on the pilot phase of a research project focused on understanding whether the Arts could enable social cohesion, as the 2012 National Development Plan (2030) had promoted. The project, which had been conceptualised by one of the authors of this article in early 2014, 1 followed both experience and observation of the challenges with regards this concept in the Arts, Culture and Heritage sectors of South Africa. Subsequent reflection and questioning of some of the related challenges, problematised the role that higher education had in societal transformation, and accordingly, in the conceptual development of social cohesion: Were universities creating appropriate conceptual frameworks and praxes required for the post-apartheid South African context? The disruption created by the 2008 'Reitz Video' and the UFS's subsequent decision to critically explore the meanings and trajectories thereof as part of the university's transformation process, opened an important space also for the interrogation of concepts like that of 'Arts' and 'Social Cohesion' in South Africa. The 'Reitz Video' when read as a 'Visual', signaled the need to not only understand and address racism more substantively, but also the need to understand the power of the visual in the disruption of outdated social imaginaries and, in the production of what the new social imaginaries could also be. Research questions around the visual were subsequently set for the pilot phase of the project in 2014. These included firstly, the need to question how social cohesion was thought of and worked with in an African context by emerging and established visual 1 Giselle Baillie.
This article examines the process of creating a collaborative art exhibition, ‘Dis Nag' – The Cape’s Hidden Roots in Slavery’ (23 September –10 October 1998) which took place at the Slave Lodge (then Cultural History Museum) in Cape Town, South Africa (now the site of a permanent exhibition on slavery, ‘Remembering Slavery’, as a means through which seemingly separate and particularised histories may be shared and collectively owned across cultural groups, in moving towards a collective national identity for South Africans. The role of the exhibition space is examined as a means of shaping, through praxis, new histories in the present; as well as considering the major tensions and contradictions involved within such transformative processes, with a consideration of how such processes relate to current debates in museology. The study is derived in part from previous research4 examining materiality, shifts in perceptions of self-identities away from racialised constructs in the new South Africa, and focusing on artmaking as a medium for social agency, performance and shifting self-identities for historically disadvantaged artists in Cape Town, South Africa.
Relocating the Centre: Decolonising the University Art Collections in South Africa
2021
The collection of art by South African universities was inherent to colonial practice and central to this was a Eurocentric, colonial logic of classification and justification. As a decolonial project, I argue for the relocation of that particular centrality and question the situatedness—the epistemic involvement within a particular space or context—of the philosophies that inform the university art collections in South Africa (Daniel and Greytak 2013; Mignolo 2003; Walsh 2007). I then argue that, because of the legacy of colonialism in Africa, the tastes and aesthetics of art collected by university art collections are still largely influenced by Eurocentric epistemologies and their imagination of Africa (Mungazi 2005). In South Africa, like in many other former European colonies, “the production of knowledge […], has long been subject to colonial and imperial designs, to geopolitics that universalizes European thought as scientific truths, while subalternising and invisibilising o...
2005
This study examines how historically disadvantaged artists shift self-identities through artmaking beyond previously racialised, hierarchised and essentialist constructs in a transforming New South Africa. Fieldwork research involved direct observation, working with artists on art projects, and interviews with visual artists and other arts practitioners in Cape Town, 1998-2001. Artworks are examined as events incorporating social change, and thus as a focal point between unconscious praxis and the cognitive coming-to-awareness of self within-the-world. Using a non-essentialist approach to identity construction, I argue for an understanding of, and approach to, studying individual identity that incorporates complexity, multiplicity, materiality and change as integral to identity formation. The reworking of memory materially within artworks is demonstrated through examining how artists represented autobiographical and historical referents of identity to affirm and represent new narratives of self in South Africa's present. How artists respond to, and negotiate, tensions and contradiction between concepts of 'freedom' and externally-derived categories of value within socio-\ economic limitations in a transforming South African art world is also explored. I also show how artworks act as sites of transcultural encounter for artists, within their awareness of different gazes and contexts of interpretation, to position identities simultaneously both within the local and beyond the local, through different images, styles, techniques and technologies in their work. Finally, I demonstrate how different collaborative art projects, through artistic praxis, enable mutual processes of social and artistic collective identification between artists of different socio-cultural backgrounds, in relation to processes of nation-building and reconciliation for South Africa in the future. The study not only provides insight into art-making in South Africa and material processes of cognitive identity construction, but also how individuals act as agents in shifting self-identities within processes of collective socio-political transformati on.
Introducing the pasts and presence of art in South Africa
The pasts and presence of art in South Africa, 2020
In 2015, #RhodesMustFall generated the largest student protests in South Africa since the end of apartheid, subsequently inspiring protests and acts of decolonial iconoclasm across the globe. The performances that emerged in, through and around #RhodesMustFall make it clear how analytically fruitful Alfred Gell’s notion that art is ‘a system of social action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it’ can be, even when attempting to account for South Africa’s very recent history. What light can this approach shed on the region’s far longer history of artistic practices? Can we use any resulting insights to explore art’s role in the very long history of human life in the land now called South Africa? Can we find a common way of talking about ‘art’ that makes sense across South Africa’s long span of human history, whether considering engraved ochre, painted rock shelters or contemporary performance art? This collection of essays has its origins in a conference with the same title, arranged to mark the opening of the British Museum’s major temporary exhibition South Africa: the art of a nation in October 2016. The volume represents an important step in developing a framework for engaging with South Africa’s artistic traditions that begins to transcend nineteenth-century frameworks associated with colonial power.
2018
This text was originally a brief speech in a debate – Dialogues and Itineraries of the South from Kinshasa: Art, History and Education that took place at Mário de Andrade Library’s Auditorium in São Paulo (Brazil) on October 26th 2016. It draws from questions and discussions in Kinshasa, concerning arts education, the challenges in decolonizing curriculum and methods, connecting them to South African experiences, particularly at the Wits School of Arts (Johannesburg) and also from the Another Road Map School research group workshops. David Andrew *