Browsing by Author "Makhubu, Nomusa"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Decolonizing visualities: changing cultural paradigms, freeing ourselves from Western-centric epistemes.
    (2017) Ka Zenzile, Mawande; Makhubu, Nomusa
    In this study, I hope to challenge the absolute belief in academia, which assumes that the perception of reality or visualities; in terms of culture, nature, truth and so on, by definition should be understood according to the Western philosophical character and genealogy as developed from a positivist paradigm. It seems to me, that the dominant methodological frameworks as I know them now, tacitly follow this scientific, quantitative, material, mechanical, positivist paradigm that draws from Western philosophical development and positions, pervasively held as the only basis for knowledge production. In turn, this philosophical position delegitimises any other epistemologies or methodological frameworks from elsewhere. In many cases, the methods of teaching and assessing subscribe, impose and perpetuate these same protocols as the only recognised epistemological and methodological approaches for critical inquiry inside tertiary educational institutions. By far, fine art as a discipline has inherited this epistemological position. To define this field in the context of decolonisation (meaning the undoing of colonisation), it requires us to look beyond disciplinary knowledge. This research is primarily an epistemological critique; and does not simply seek to “Africanise” the study of art, but to condemn the pervasive institutionalised cultural dominance. To frame my discourse, I have adopted an anti-colonial perspective, and a qualitative method to help define this phenomenon through a wide range of techniques. These include grounded theory; propositional logic; case study, narrative inquiry and auto-ethnography as possible tool for collecting, coding and analysing of data.
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    eBhish' - articulations of Black Oceanic presence eThekwini
    (2022) Nyawose, Luvuyo Equiano; Makhubu, Nomusa
    The legacies of colonialism and apartheid echo in many forms of social practice in contemporary South Africa. Ibhish' laseThekwini (the Durban beachfront), a seaside public space, is imbued with a racialized tension that stems from these colonial histories. Historically, the beach was the nation's premier seaside destination and drew crowds of white beachgoers, particularly during the summer holiday season. Beach culture was established and sustained through visualisation, particularly in popular culture and media, which largely catered to white people. The beach pictorial archives housed at the Old Court House Museum eThekwini reflects this bias, as we find that in it, the predominance of white beachgoers is depicted throughout the beach's history. Since the 1990s, demarcations of those previously white beach areas changed with more Black beachgoers in the predominantly public beaches and white beachgoers relegating themselves in more secluded (lesser public and more private) areas. I have been documenting Black beachgoers to understand the nuances of Black social life ebhishi (at the beach). In the understanding of this social life, one of the notions that become important is the ocean as a witness. We might think of the ocean as a subject which holds memory. This is particularly important in my work as it looks at how I relate to the ulwandle (the ocean) and engage with the beach as a meeting point of Black people in summer holidays, and as an articulation of an unnameable space (a metaphysical realm) beyond the constraints of capitalist leisure which is crucial for spiritual survival. Through my work, I'm contributing to a contemporary archive of Black social life ebhishi, one with humanising, tender and intimate moments aimed at inscribing our place in the seaside eThekwini.
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    ILIZWE LIFILE
    (2020) Somdyala, Inga; Makhubu, Nomusa; Alexander J
    ILIZWE LIFILE is a tactile exploration of the aspects of cultural history kwaXhosa within South African political history that intersect with my own lived experience. Through drawings, tableau, sculptures and video, I explore how cultural, social and political narratives within the South African post-apartheid landscape are negotiated. In this explicatory document, divided in three parts, I focus on interrelated personal and collective histories. Part I establishes a broad overview of the personal experiences driving my studio practice and research enquiries. Drawing from Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness (2000) to explore readings of history, displacement, education and landscape, I elaborate on a negotiation of my cultural identity within the contentions about collective history and national identity. Part II looks at the negation of black cultural identity through covert impositions of Eurocentric culture and epistemology within education systems in my experience and within history. I employ concepts from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2017) to develop socio-political readings of the television series Yizo Yizo, linking its thematic universe to heterogeneous black identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Part III presents how aspects of an oppressive history are manifest in the present, while offering more explicit interpretations of my body of work as a means for exploring the residue of history in the present.
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    Imfihlo
    (2016) Siwani, Buhlebezwe; Makhubu, Nomusa; Searle, Berni
    The discourses of ritual, culture and ethics has, over the years, been a primarily ethnographic, philosophical and dramaturgical concern. Secrecy seems central in setting boundaries. Using ritual and culture as the common thread, I question the boundaries that are transgressed by contemporary South African artists in 'showing' and 'telling' things that are otherwise considered as secret. I discuss the ways in which my own practice as an artist and isangoma troubles the threshold. Considering the ideological function of the secret, my work examines the power relations implied in both keeping and divulging 'secrets'. This research poses the question: how does the performance or re-enactment of the secret elements of cultural and traditional practice in live, performance and installation art complicate cultural ethics? Through a discussion of my work, Imfihlo, as well as works by artists such as Nicholas Hlobo, Pieter Hugo, Churchill Madikida, Nelisiwe Xaba and Mocke J van Veuren, I relate the role of secrecy in ideological structures with the trace. This concept exists throughout my research, whether it be in: forgotten histories; rituals and people (what the artist leaves behind); tracing space, or; by exploring the trace as an existential body, a trace of someone who once was, who exists in another realm, and many traces in one body.
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    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.
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    Mambokadzi
    (2021) Chiwa, Akudzwe Elsie; Makhubu, Nomusa; Alexander, Jane
    Mambokadzi is built around the stories of my matrilineal histories and centred on the intimate space in which my grandmother, mother and I exist. It also seeks to recognize the collective space of Black womxn through an exploration of the royal ancestral spirit Nehanda who instigated the first Chimurenga (resistance-struggle) of 1896-97. This space is one tainted by colonial and patriarchal trauma, yet concurrently subverts colonial ideas of gender, particularly the feminine. Mambokadzi is intended to embody a decolonial idea of gender and femininity. In this collective space, womxn have consciously and unconsciously cultivated power within the confines of patriarchy, masculinity and coloniality. Through sculpture, I interrogate learned perceptions about gender and reflect on experiences of womxn in my family as a way to discuss womxnhood in Southern Africa and the diaspora broadly
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    Stranger's Location: Interrogating Apartheid Spatial Legacies and the Idea of Home in New Brighton
    (2017) Gqunta, Lungiswa; Makhubu, Nomusa; Alexander, Jane
    My research focusses on certain aspects of dispossession that are a result of apartheid and some of the different forms it takes. I am particularly concerned with the repercussions of racial segregation in the form of apartheid architecture and ‘township planning', as well as social issues such as alcohol abuse and the honouring of ancestral heritage in relation to my own experience. In this regard, I question what happens to the ceremonial offerings buried in the ground when a family or group of people are forcibly removed? What of their stability? All of these issues can be identified across South Africa but I am specifically interested in the city of Port Elizabeth and the township named New Brighton – where I was born. Port Elizabeth has an interesting but problematic history involving forced removals, resulting in townships such as New Brighton. This document serves as an explication of a body of practical work that forms the major part of this research which strives to highlight the historical continuation of segregation and make visible the issues previously mentioned. My multimedia works explore the violence of forced removals during the colonial and apartheid period, and how this affected the ancestral relationships that some Xhosa families had established and practised within their homes. The work deals with the issue of alcohol abuse within the black communities in New Brighton and the damaging impact of commercially produced alcohol on health and social wellbeing in relation to economic security. Since pre-apartheid times, South African black women did not only have systems of oppression such as segregation to resist, but the stronghold of patriarchy and the violences it resulted in. “Gender-based violence is often linked to patterns of patriarchy and systems of oppression that are in accord with those found during the colonial period in South Africa. The patterns of exploitation did not end with colonialism but were extended within the apartheid system of white-minority rule.” (Hannah Britton 2006:148) These violences worsened during apartheid making it an even more dangerous and vulnerable place to live in as black women. I argue that the previously mentioned forms of violence are issues that we still grapple with today which have taken a more subtle and insidious form and therefore have lost some sense of urgency. It is this urgency that I am trying to re-ignite through my works. This narrative is told from the experiences of the resilient and resistant black women in my family but not forgetting the other black women with whom I have crossed paths.
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    The impossible paradigm: an approach to producing knowledge
    (2018) Gamedze, Thulile Esther; Makhubu, Nomusa
    Processes of knowledge production frequently evade formal education spaces, like universities. We should never assume that these spaces genuinely operate towards the production of knowledge, and rather should identify most of them as acting in opposition. In other words, this thesis begins by putting the very foundation of formal education (producing knowledge) into question. ‘Production' implies the formation of something new, something that is created with agency, and something that is different from the idea of reproduction. Reproduction refers to the repetition of a preestablished process. In Marxist theory, social reproduction refers to societal processes, within education and economics for instance, whose intention is the remanifestation of capitalist relationships (Marx 1887). Through critical pedagogy and Afrofuturism, I analyse the pedagogical practices of the RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement and the Medu Art Ensemble.