OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Josephy, Svea"

Browsing by Author "Josephy, Svea"

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Between forever and never : the photograph as a bridge between past and present; memory and it's fiction, 1981-2009
(2009) Altschuler, Jenny; Josephy, Svea
In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes (1980: 64-66), describes the process of looking through his mother's photographs after her death. He weighs up how much of her he recognises in the images he comes across. He evaluates the versions of her that are portrayed and deduces that "none seem to be really 'right':" neither as photographic performances nor as existing recurrences of "the beloved face" that he carries in his psyche. He talks about trying to find her, and achieves only part satisfaction in pinpointing fragments in each image that seem to depict parts of the mother he knows. He concludes that by being partially true, the total representation in each image is false. He suggests that the physical details and direct documentations of his mother's physical self, do not contain the sense of her, as he knows her.
Open Access
Borderlands and Political Ecology: A photographic exploration of the environment, territories, boundaries and power near the imaginary line of the equator
(2020) Meyer, Garth; Josephy, Svea
For several years I have photographed primary hardwood forests along the imaginary line of the equator to communicate, persuade and warn of the continued ecological destruction that is occurring along this line. My plan was to capture arcadian visions of equatorial hardwood primary forests before they are destroyed and to show how this arcadian vision is disrupted by a more dystopian one. The images in this project were photographed in three areas that circle the equator: Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, where over half the world's rainforests are concentrated, and which I visited to follow the line. Line is an attempt to understand the current pressures on the equatorial environment and create a photographic exploration of ecology that highlights and foregrounds land, space, territories, boundaries and power. For this, myfield of study and research considers ecology through the theory and lens of photography.
Open Access
(De)Constructing worlds: high Modernism, architecture and photography
(2018) Pelser, Suraya; Josephy, Svea
Since the last decade of the twentieth century, there has been renewed interest in photographing high Modernist structures and architectures. A significant portion of these images has tended towards the autotelic or spectacle, with far fewer functioning as social commentary or critique. However, the need for an independent and critical photography of architecture remains. Such a practice furthers our understanding of the lasting legacy of architectural modernity and its ongoing impact/s. This dissertation investigates the critical representation of high Modernist structures, architectures, and urban planning in specific works by contemporary artists and photographers, Andreas Gursky, Filip Dujardin, David Goldblatt, and Beate Gütschow. However diverse their practice, each of these artists and photographers engages with the authoritarian impetus of high Modernism: a drive towards social order and control enacted through its structures and architectures. Through investigation of a range of photographic projects produced with a view to critique the social expression of high Modernism, I argue that contemporary photography which takes architecture as its subject has the ability to communicate wider notions about society. These artists and photographers reveal the degree to which humanity has been elided by high Modernist architectures and planning. By discussing these projects I contribute to a relatively under-researched area of study.
Open Access
The farm
(2011) Scholtz-Hofmeyr, Renzske; Josephy, Svea; Skotnes, Pippa
During the late 1880s Gerhardus Robert Stewart and his wife Alida Johanna Maria Stewart, second generation settlers from the Great Trek, bought a 250-hectare farm 20 kilometres southwest of Pretoria. During the next 100 years the farm became a working farm, and supported a chalk quarry. The family grew and flourished and the land was passed down from generation to generation. ... This MFA project has been my attempt to represent this land and the meaning it holds and once held for my mother, her parents and grandparents. My strategy has been to act as curator, assembling 'the archive' the farm represents, and then finding a way of ordering the meaning that has flowed therefrom. In doing this I have had to, and wanted to, confront both an irrepressible attachment to an ancestral home and the ways in which land itself can appear changed, not by any physical alteration, but by the events that occur on it. In creating this project, I have attempted to resolve an irresolvable paradox – how to represent the past before the present.That this has proved, in this case in particular, to be impossible, has not rendered the attempt meaningless. Indeed, I believe and hope, it will raise in the viewer's mind the question of just how much we are able to see of what is before us that we do not already know, and how much the present can change the past.
Open Access
Fixing the Shadows: A photographic exploration of beginnings and endings
(2023) Cowling, Vanessa; Josephy, Svea
Fixing the shadows is a photographic project that focuses on processes of cameraless photography and seeks out new ways to work with darkroom- based photography that I regard as less environmentally and personally destructive. I explore how methods of fixing an image trace can technically represent a form of mending, which I associate with the practise of care. The project is reliant on the reciprocal relationship between myself and plants, acknowledging plant agency. Fixing the shadows is also a personal project that began with the death of my father, and in this sense seeks to mend a personal grief. Together with students, family, friends and colleagues, I have planted and grown a sustainable photographic garden. It is a gesture of reciprocal practise to heal a small piece of ground, which is indicative of a larger world in environmental crisis. The exhibition is comprised of the garden, lumen prints, anthotypes, phytograms and a light installation presented in immersive form. The presence of plant life is traced through chemical processes of cameraless photography and the unusual colour emanations that result from its shadows. It is hoped that this immersive, dynamic exhibition will for a moment dispel fear and grief, bringing the viewer out of the shadows and into the light.
Open Access
Fixing the Shadows: A photographic exploration of beginnings and endings
(2023) Cowling, Vanessa; Josephy, Svea
Fixing the shadows is a photographic project that focuses on processes of cameraless photography and seeks out new ways to work with darkroombased photography that I regard as less environmentally and personally destructive. I explore how methods of fixing an image trace can technically represent a form of mending, which I associate with the practise of care. The project is reliant on the reciprocal relationship between myself and plants, acknowledging plant agency. Fixing the shadows is also a personal project that began with the death of my father, and in this sense seeks to mend a personal grief. Together with students, family, friends and colleagues, I have planted and grown a sustainable photographic garden. It is a gesture of reciprocal practise to heal a small piece of ground, which is indicative of a larger world in environmental crisis. The exhibition is comprised of the garden, lumen prints, anthotypes, phytograms and a light installation presented in immersive form. The presence of plant life is traced through chemical processes of cameraless photography and the unusual colour emanations that result from its shadows. It is hoped that this immersive, dynamic exhibition will for a moment dispel fear and grief, bringing the viewer out of the shadows and into the light
Open Access
How does collective practice function as an artistic strategy
(2019) Weber, Deborah; Lamprecht, Andrew; Josephy, Svea
This research interrogates the different strategies and methodologies employed by collectives (with a focus on South African collectives in the past two decades) to raise fundamental questions about art; the nature of artistic work, forms of production, authorship, autonomy and collaboration as an artistic strategy. The research sets out to explore collaboration as a field of art practice. The criteria for selection of the collectives in the research was each collective needed to comprise of three or more artists who have produced and authored work together under an umbrella name, they also needed to use multi-disciplinary practices. The selection included: Galerie Puta (2003), Avant Car Guard (2004), Doing it for Daddy (2006), Gugulective (2006), Centre for Historical Enactments (2010), Burning Museum (2013) and iQhiya (2015), Guerilla Girls (1985), Laboratoire Agit’Art (1975), Raqs Media Collective (1992), Ubulungiswa/Justice and Karoo Disclosure (2014). The idea of shared authorship is the central tenet around which all collective practice revolves. This thesis looks at the collective authorial voice as a strategic artistic practice in contemporary art that enables reappraisals of artistic production. Furthermore it interrogates the decentralization of authorship, as an artistic strategy to shift paradigms of thinking in relation to power structures, be it institutional, political or ideological.
Open Access
In/Between: Phillipi Photographed
Hammond, Michael Brian; Josephy, Svea
Philippi, a farming area outside Cape Town, is strained by social relations and spatial concerns, the pressures of development, industry, farming, sand mining and environmental issues. This photographic project investigates how the people of Philippi live in their immediate space, where particular historical, social and political influences mark their identities. These identities are constructed through the legacy of apartheid and manifest themselves in socio-economic and racial dynamics. This photographic project focuses on the Phillipi area and its people. I chose the horticultural area of Philippi in the Cape Flats for its complex and intricate socio-political structure. During this investigation I made a photobook In/ between, which speaks to topics of land and identity in the microcosm of Philipi, but also in the broader macrocosm of South Africa. In this document, I investigate the position of the photobook within the contemporary arts, with a particular focus on the South African photobook. I also look at the shifting understanding of documentary photography in South Africa, and my position within its' traditions. Making the photobook In/between allowed me the opportunity to explore photography as a tool for self-reflection and pursuing my own understanding of the world around me; to move away from a more traditional journalistic approach to other ways of telling a story through the medium of photography. This document situates, contextualises and explicates my visual research for this project.
Open Access
Iyarara: Loss and Found
(2023) Nsabimana, Jean Claude; Josephy, Svea; Alexander, Jane
This MFA research project investigates the issue of e-waste in Africa, drawing attention to the cycle of trade associated with the extraction and exploitation of minerals in Africa and the impact on the environment and lives of people on the continent. The project uses e-waste to highlight sponsored conflict in Africa, the displacement of millions of people and the dumping of outdated and unwanted electronic goods back on the continent. The attendant exhibition, foregrounded the impact of colonialism, capitalism and the competition for mineral resources that have impacted millions of lives. Personal experience is woven into this wasted landscape, considering the repurposed materials used by many artists in Africa historically and contemporarily and their relationship both to these social and environmental issues and to European and North American art history.
Open Access
Kwasuka Sukela: re-imagined bodies of a (South African) 1990s born woman
(2018) Msezane,Sethembile; Makhubu, Nomusa; Josephy, Svea
Through an analysis of my artistic work, I examine past and present representations of black women in South African public and private domains. Having been confronted with monuments erected to celebrate British colonialism and Afrikaner nationalism, I focus on the paucity of iconic black women in history and mythology. I perform figures who I construct from existing histories and look to the women in my own family archive to memorialise them. For this reason, performance has been key, in my practice, in re-locating the presence of the black female body. In South African architecture, monuments and public sculpture there is a lack of representation of black women. I refer to sites where statues and monuments have been erected to commemorate certain histories. Having experienced these spaces as particularly masculine and racialised, I perform women whom I consider to be significant. As a young black woman investigating current socio-political issues in South Africa, I draw parallels with the past. I embody these women in sculptural installations and in public spaces as living sculptures standing on a white plinth. In relation to these public performances, the exhibition includes sculptural installations that speak to the interplay of public and private domains. Animism and Ubuntu form part of the spiritual agency that is present in this work. Collectively these works narrate resistance and self-assertion in response to dominant ideologies in the public space.
Open Access
Making space: photographic traces of absence, stillness and the in-between in public spaces
(2022) Fraser, Nicole Clare; Josephy, Svea; Inggs, Stephen
My photographic project Making Space: Photographic Traces of Absence, Stillness and the In-Between in Public Spaces explores banal and commonplace empty spaces, non-places, liminal spaces and ordinary, inanimate objects. In the first section, Situating my Practice, I contextualise my practice within the broader context of photography and architecture, looking specifically at the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975) and affiliated photographers to highlight ideas about photographically documenting built structures. The visual language of the deadpan aesthetic is an important aspect of my work, and I elaborate on and explore “neutral” and “objective” ways of seeing. I consider a selection of photographers to establish various ways in which imagemakers use a formalistic photographic approach to communicate narratives through the representation of built structures. I expand on a phenomenological approach to making images, exploring notions of tenderness, care, alienation and violence. In the second section of the document, (Dis)Locating my Practice and Making Space, I position myself within the identified terrain to further explicate my practice and project. The physical project takes the form of silver gelatin handprints, larger inkjet prints and a video projection, and I discuss the method of display and curation of the exhibition and how they motivate ways of looking, slowness and intimacy.
Open Access
Not Making Big Rocks Small: Decolonising and Queering the Archive through Personal Narrative in the Film Essay
(2018) Heilig, Megan-Leigh; Siopis, Penny; Josephy, Svea
For my MFA, I aimed to reflect on my personal experiences and family history through the medium of a film essay and installation. By showing it in a public space, I hope to start a conversation about how white South Africans can reimagine their role within the decolonisation project as one that is active, present and uncomfortable.
Open Access
Practices of Listening: (Re)percussions of Sound, Silences and Censorship from (Post-)Apartheid South Africa
(2019) Swinney, Warrick; Campbell, Kurt; Josephy, Svea
This project is situated in the area of sonic art and explores my personal biography in relation to sound, silence, censorship and social control. Using the artistic productions of John Cage, I examine silence as both an object—a recording in a fixed medium—and as a verb directly addressing the question of censorship of the self and of others. The interplay of silencing and silence is expressed in my artistic practice which employs, as audio palate, the silences between the words of significant political speeches from South Africa. As a consequence of this process I have excised all recognizable words in various aural and video works leaving only the 'Cagean’ noise of the silence. I further examine related aspects of silence and silencing through the metaphor of the mute button—a mechanical silencing device—which serves both as a creative tool in a recording studio as well as a censorial device to prohibit voices being heard. The beating, hitting and silences are all set against a backdrop of (post) apartheid South Africa for the expression of some of my personal and theoretical realisations.
Open Access
Seeing death : portraiture in contemporary postmortem photography
(2013) Higgins, Josephine; Richards, Colin; Josephy, Svea
This thesis focuses on the aesthetics of the photographic representation of the actual dead body in Elizabeth Heyert's The Travelers (2004), Pieter Hugo's The Bereaved (2005) and Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta's Life Before Death: Portraits of the Dying (2004). The use of portraiture in each of these artist's series is crucial as it suggests an interest in the 'subjectness' of the corpse. Katarzyna Majak's (2011) theory of socialization as an attempt to lessen the scandal of the corpse through representation is central throughout this thesis. Majak argues that for the viewer the corpse is a scandal, because it discomfortingly presents the transformation of a body from subject to object. For Majak, socialization is essentially the taming of the dead body, achieved by re-presenting the corpse as an individual. Socialization emphasizes the subject-ness of the deceased individual, rather than the object-ness of the corpse, of pure unadulterated matter. The use of portraiture in each of the above series socializes the corpse by presenting the individual identity of the deceased as a subject, in varying degrees. Death is approached through the recognizable conventions of portraiture itself, thereby to some extent taming or domesticating the corpse. This thesis expands on Majak's valuable theory by establishing a continuum of socialization from subject-ness to object-ness. Importantly, this continuum reveals varying degrees of socialization within the three series. Socialization is used here as an analytical tool with which to explore the photographs, drawing out similarities and differences. I argue that through various aesthetic techniques, these three series encourage the viewer to look at these different images of the corpse with varying degrees of comfort.
Open Access
Separate amenities : topographics of recreational spaces in South Africa
(2011) Bezuidenhout, Vincent; Josephy, Svea
The body of photographs discussed in this document examine the way in which the landscape was constructed to enforce separation, in the form of separate amenities, during the time of apartheid in South Africa. This project is situated within the context of a long history of representation of the landscape, but I will position my practise within the more recent political history of apartheid during which separate amenities were created. Referring to David Goldblatt's interpretation of structures with regards to his representation of the South African landscape I will examine both the political and structural history of these locations.
Open Access
A space between : contemplating the post-Holocaust subject
(2010) Washkansky, Dale; Josephy, Svea
In 2008 I travelled, with camera in hand, to Germany in order to photograph the two concentration camps to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück. These are two of several camps that Germany established during the late 1930s to house so called undesirables or those believed to be enemies of the Reich. These people were not only extracted from society within Germany, but later from all occupied territories. European Jewry was the primary target of this policy. Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, but they were not the only victims. Approximately one and a half million Gypsies, at least 250 000 physically or mentally disabled people, three million Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Social Democrats, Communists, partisans, trade unionists and Polish intelligentsia were among those that fell victim to the Nazis. The Germany's concentration camps, these prisoners of the Reich were set to work under severe inhumane conditions as slave labour, which was also a means of torture, as efficient production was not the primary endeavour of these camps. It was only when war broke out that policy altered and the labour was utilised by German enterprises and to aid Germany's war effort. These camps formed part of a larger system that later sought to eventually annihilate these "enemies". There were also transit camps to those camps located towards the east, in Poland - the notorious death camps, where mass murder became harrowingly efficient.
Open Access
Uitsig
(2013) Walters, Ashley; Josephy, Svea
This project considers the landscapes, spaces, structures and lives lived in the suburb of Uitsig on the periphery of the Mother City of Cape Town, and in so doing argues for a consideration of those who not only lived during apartheid, but who live after its demise. In addition to questions of photographic representation, the project also addresses ideas of space, and unarticulated injuries and trauma. Photography is well suited as a medium through which to consider these difficult questions, for in its very inception the medium is one of simultaneous absence and presence.
Open Access
Unravelling: Photographic Explorations Of Mending The Forest
(2023) Pretorius, Emme; Brundrit, Jean; Josephy, Svea
Unravelling: Photographic Explorations of Mending the Forest explores aspects of South Africa's Garden Route Afrotemperate forests and my relationship to them through my artistic practice. This project looks at the unravelling of these forests and at my unravelling within these forests and my artistic process. It is concerned with the coming undone of these forests' intricate systems in the interest of the Capitalocene, and with my figurative artistic attempts to fix these forests. This project further aims to make this unravelling visible, to indicate the faded and fragmented state of these forests. It also addresses the futility of some of the attempts to rectify the damage done to these forests. This document explores the importance of process and materiality in photography and in my artistic practice. Through the experimental use of darkroom processes, expired paper and the sewing of fragmented photographs, I aim to demonstrate how such processes and attention to materiality can make my practical and theoretical concerns visible.
Open Access
Unstable ground: a photographic reflection on the landscape of Table Mountain
(2022) van der Merwe, Eugene; Josephy, Svea
In my MFA project Unstable Ground: A Photographic Reflection on the Landscape of Table Mountain, I have photographed the landscape of Table Mountain, surrounding parks and green spaces to reflect on the entanglements between its history, notions of nature and landscape and subjective relationships to place. I have tried to make sense of this site through my photographs, research, and writing, not looking for stability but seeking to reveal the precarious, the in-between, the unseeable, while also trying to learn more about my own relationship with this landscape and land and how it allows or denies photographic representation. Table Mountain's geology, composed of layers of rock and sediment, is overlaid on its surface with human impositions, and its cultural history is similarly composed of the sedimented layers of meaning brought to it by all those who have interacted with the site over time. These layers and erasures contribute to this project's reading of the site as a palimpsest. Each place I photographed represented multiple stories, multiple opinions, multiple histories and multiple points of view, and I have used different methods of layering in my photographs to evoke these strata and deposits.

Browsing by Author "Josephy, Svea"

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