Browsing by Author "Huigen-Conradie, Stephane"

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    The vampire inside my camera: an exhumation of gender, monstrosity and queer worldmaking through photography and video
    (2025) Carosin, Gem; Josephy, Svea; Huigen-Conradie, Stephane; Brundrit, Jean
    Gem Carosin's MFA project The Vampire inside my Camera: an exhumation of gender, monstrosity and queer worldmaking through photography and video uses the vampire character as metaphor investigating shame and desire through a queer lens. Examining how the vampire has taken shape in the public imagination, this text discusses folktales, art- historical and literary influences. Through a historical revisionist approach, monstrosity and the example of the vampire are parallelled to the negative assumptions about queer lives. By recontextualising the compositions and lighting of paintings, Gem draws the past into the present. Temporality, chronopolitics and the disruptive capacity of the undead immortal are of interest to Gem as they explore the limits of heteronormative structures of time-keeping. They break down how and why queer people may use troubled temporality and fluid depictions of gender to imagine utopian futures and queer worlds. This is pinpointed in the horror genre of film and various contemporary artforms that displace linearity. Gem's photography and video art portrays them as the monstrous vampire character, positioning their project as specific to them and their orientation to the world. Using their queer chosen family as photographic subjects, Gem explores what it means to be a monster among monsters in a safe-haven of eternal night. This body of work emphasises the importance of storytelling and imagining in creating queer spaces. Prioritising humour, joy and pleasure in their video work highlights how queer history is often defined by queer suffering. Gem hopes that their photographs will reach other queer individuals and provide comfort and kinship.
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    Unbound: An Origin Story
    (2024) Moshayov, Guy; Huigen-Conradie, Stephane; Mackenny V
    In Unbound, I embark on a semi-autobiographical quest, through which I reflect on the subject of a ‘myth of origin'. I rely on the two foundational yet competing epistemes that have been shaping my understanding of the concept throughout my life: On one end, the dogmatic Abrahamic mythology with which I was raised as an Israeli Jew; On the opposing end, Darwin's theory of evolution, as laid out in On The Origin of Species, which gradually came to replace many of my childhood's traditional narratives. In a body of work comprising a graphic novel and a series of large-scale oil paintings, the Darwinian and Abrahamic stories clash, bend, and blend. Unbound is the practice of reflexive doubt. While this project exists in an academic sphere, I refrain from calling it ‘research' in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, I choose to frame my academic practice as ‘artistic inquiry', for it is aimed at asking critical questions, rather than providing definitive answers. For this end, I generate a lexicon of visual iconography, a strategy which, in the words of art scholar Daniel Morris, enables the work to live between ‘public history and private myth'. I draw from an array of influential Jewish artists who have utilized this strategy effectively, among which are Philip Guston, William Kentridge, Dana Schutz, Will Eisner, and Art Spiegelman. According to Morris, relating to public history through the use of a private lexicon provides the work a germinative property which enables it to outlive the time in which it was created. Unbound aims to obtain this very same effect.
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    We have lost one another
    (2025) Price, Ayesha; Huigen-Conradie, Stephane; Alexander, Jane
    This study is located in the ontologies of things that are widely identified, contested or self- determined as belonging to contemporary District Six in Cape Town, South Africa; a site of ongoing loss through settler colonialism, forced removals and now restitution. In this pivotal time of return bodies and land once displaced reunite, this study focusses on the fissure between subjects, objects and relations (things) as District Six enters the phase of reparation, redevelopment, commodification and private ownership. This project aims to explore the possibilities of using visual art methodology as a mediator between its people and its land through the praxis of Socially-engaged Art and in dialogue with the philosophies of New Materialism and Object-oriented Ontology. As a current resident of District Six, I collaborate with human and non-human components of the ruptured District Six ecosystem to facilitate a site-specific installation that recognises people and land as equal actants in the struggle for social cohesion and social justice.