OpenUCT :: Browsing by Subject "fine art"

Browsing by Subject "fine art"

Now showing 1 - 13 of 13

Open Access
An electronic laager: a sculptural interpretation of post-industrial society's cybernetic order
(1994) van der Schijff, Johann; Younge, J G F
There is the need to express what it is like to be a feeling, thinking, young person growing up on the southern tip of the African continent today, and this, from a generation who have had to cope with and survive the pressures of brain washing or intellectual laundering that an education in a State school in South Africa usually enforces. It is a generation trying to come to terms with information that has been filtered through the organs of the State radio and television systems, which routinely exclude news not deemed to be in the public interest, and substitutes an iconology dedicated to the values of sunny skies, beer and braaivleis. (Dubow 1986: 60) As an artist living in South Africa, I am part of the generation that has had to cope with the 'intellectual laundering' Dubow speaks of. I have experienced the ways in which apartheid, as a cultural norm governing society, has been constructed. It is around these issues that the title, An electronic laager: A sculptural interpretation of post-industrial society's cybernetic order, forms a concise description, and 'key' to an interpretation and understanding of the various issues which have amalgamated to inform my iconography, and the way in which these issues have been transformed into sculptural expression.
Open Access
Apart
(2021) Smith, Elizabeth; Skotnes, Philippa; Saptouw, Fabian
The exhibition is comprised of a collection of objects that I have gathered over the course of this project. The objects have been tinkered with, cobbled, and transformed in order to generate new outlooks on function, materiality and studio- based processes. Through these objects and in partnership with them, I am a tinker, a cobbler, and a transformer. Objects have come apart and been reassembled to suggest new modes of use, and in doing so pays homage to the object often ignored and discarded.
Open Access
Bo Mmaruri: Bosadi
(2021) Makgekgenene, Legakwana; Searle, Bernadette; Alexander Jane
Post-colonial Botswana is analysed in this body of work as an anecdote. Its landscapes, history, culture, traditions, norms and identity are deconstructed and reconstituted in a heterotopia of my own making. Motivated by the decline in the momentum and visibility of Botswana's women's movements, the project asks how non-male resistance and self-determination has and can operate in Botswana, particularly in traditional and cultural spaces. In this work, I identify storytelling and folklore as a device that though culturally-specific, is reflected across nations on the continent, and so, allows a meditation on personal and national identity that is not restrictive or isolating as it must occur in constant reference to the culture(s) around it. Through my own works and the works of Thebe Phetogo, Meleko Mokgosi, Athi Patra-Ruga and Kudzanai Chuirai, I discuss the ‘making visual' of oral and folklore culture to highlight the interconnectedness of African narratives and oral storytelling/performing practices while deconstructing Botswana's conceptual basis, which this work sees as being folklore itself.
Open Access
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.
Open Access
In the flesh
(2022) Kim, Jueun; Searle, Bernadette; van der Schijff, Johann
The core difference between machines and humans is that humans have consciousness and life, albeit some machines designed and created by humanity are able to make decisions, facilitate intellectual enhancements and even develop physically. Humanity is dependent on a network of machines and technologies that transfer power to and engage with residences, industries and day-to-day activities, and as much as it is humanity that advances technology, they equally evolve with and through technology. This ever-evolving technology has become so integrated with human bodies and minds that it has a disturbing range of control over critical aspects of their lifestyles, to the point that humanity may be functionally impaired without it. Humanity has mechanised the simple act of being human but continues to build machines and develop technologies that act, look and respond in an increasingly human way. It is no longer possible for humanity to simply switch the machines off, because if they do, they may switch themselves off as well. The artworks and associated written dissertation of In the Flesh, set out to explore the sensitive symbiotic relationship between humans and the machines.
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
Masters, master, masturbate (a master's debate) - relooking at the home, body and self through seventeenth century Dutch still life painting
(2020) Labuschagne, Emily; Saptouw, Fabian
The still life genre has been, and arguably still is, regarded as the lowest form of painting in Western fine art history. The absence of the human figure in still life painting means that the artist does not require knowledge of either human anatomy or history for the production of the work. Given seventeenth century female painters' exclusion from the academies where anatomy was taught, it was thus a genre regarded as appropriate for female painters in Europe prior to the nineteenth century. Such dictates of propriety were indicative of gender constructs that relegated women to the private sphere of society and the domestic environment. As an accompaniment to my Masters in Fine Art exhibition titled Masters, Master, Masturbate (A master's debate), this text explores what still life painting may reveal about the relationship between the home, the body and the self in the present day. Produced from my position as a contemporary, white, female painter of Dutch descent raised within an Afrikaner culture in the context of South Africa, I suggest that a critical reconsideration of this apparently constrictive genre offers potentially liberating perspectives of gender constructs and the female painter.
Open Access
Post- Print: a moment of compression
(2022) Ranger, Adrian; Langerman, Fritha
‘Post-Print' is a practice-led project that seeks to situate the emergence of the printmaking tradition - and the notion of the print as ‘reproduction' - as a pivotal Event which once shaped a past era's perception of reality, just as the ‘digital-multiple' template today functions as a contemporary reproduction of our Being. For this project, I will draw on Slavoj Žižek's philosophical reading of the notion of ‘Event' as a framework for my central thesis: I want to expand on how the moment of compression for a technology for looking (i.e., the introduction of the printing press and the digital device) may be considered a veritable Event. In the process, I will inevitably rely on Walter Benjamin's observations in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' as an inspiration for my discussion of the print as reproduction and the image as Event. Finally, I happily acknowledge the influence of Guy Debord's ‘The Society of the Spectacle' (1967), to which I will bring a particular focus on the notion of ‘the mediation of being through the image' in relation to my video installation, entitled ‘Image-Machine'. The progression of creative discourse - the transition from the ‘print' to the ‘post' as the means of infinite reproduction - is the core of my project, as this shift of mediums contextualises my own retrospective mediations of the avalanche of images that characterise the present Event. Rather than mere diversions, I consider historical thinking and anachronism to be practical methodologies in my work. These retroactive interventions are themselves closely informed for me by the philosophical strategies of fragmentation, reframing and détournement variously proposed by Benjamin, Žižek and Debord. Thus, I will discuss here how these philosophical ideas have shaped the critical processes and curatorial choices within my final exhibition, ‘Post – Print', whilst also referencing and cross-examining my video installation, ‘Image Machine', and an installation of press-like object works, titled ‘Fragmented Studio'.
Open Access
Re-forming the monstrous
(2023) Jacobs, Gabriele; Alexander, Jane; Brundrit, Jean
Re-forming the Monstrous consists of an installation of ceramic and wooden sculpture accompanied by an audio piece, and an explicatory document. This artistic project aims to critique the entwined social and ecological violence associated with the current era, as governed by hegemonic patriarchal capitalism, with particular reference to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Donna Haraway. In the artwork, this is articulated through an imaginative reinterpretation of selected characters from Greco-Roman mythology. The trope of the Hero who must slay a monster to gain redemption for his transgressions (as in the case of Heracles) is examined and subverted. The process culminates in a sculptural installation in two parts: the first a metaphorical contemplation of the ongoing ecological and social devastation; the second composed of a number of discrete tableaux symbolising a sanctuary for the monster. In this figuration, the monster, represented by particular South African and domestic fauna, provides the departure point to consider issues of the environment, queerness and care through the immersive format of installation. The writing of queer theorists, José Estaban Munoz' s and Jack Halberstam is considered with reference to this body of work, as well as artworks by a number of local and international artists, in the context of imagining a creative salve to current global crises.
Open Access
RePair: (im)possibilities of care-taking and making with care in times of isolation
(2022) Friess, Carola; Van Der Schijff, Lucas; Campbell, Kurt
The sudden and drastic impacts the recent global health crisis had on my life, and on society more broadly, triggered intuitive processes of creation, whereby its context was difficult to grasp in the beginning. Thus, my motivation for conducting this research stemmed from a personal worry about the dystopian situation outside of my private sphere. The many social upheavals caused by the pandemic would ultimately shape my thinking through creative production. This allowed me to grasp the many intangible aspects of my life and my conception of the world in a productive way; and connect many disparate aspects through a process of corporeal engagement that, literally and figuratively, stitched emotional and conceptual ruptures together as can be observed in the art objects displayed in the exhibition. This body of work thus explores the complexity of the act of repairing as a frame for art-making: as a means to articulate strategies of care in times of isolation, with the full knowledge of an indefinite outcome that does not sully the endeavour. My former profession as a surgical nurse, a profession of collective care-taking, and profiled as an ‘essential worker' during this pandemic, has had a substantial impact on this project. My specific interest is the transition from an act of care-taking for a stranger into artistic processes in isolation, that nevertheless involves a manner of care despite important differences. The times of social separation made me realise how interconnected we are. Thus, RePair is an attempt to emphasise the importance of relational perspectives wrought from the two subject positions I inhabited as a nurse and as an artist. I consider this document in conjunction with the body of artworks displayed as a means to explore the transformative potential of a relational and affective set of aesthetic considerations in a time of a shared crisis.
Open Access
Surface tension: permeability, the body, and installation
(2023) Ducray, Luke; Alexander, Jane; Campbell, Kurt
Surface Tension – Permeability, the Body, and Installation, is comprised of a multimedia installation and an accompanying minor thesis. The concurrent points of departure for both are the body and the medium of installation itself, exploring their sympathies with the lens of permeability. The installation presents sculptures and video montage works that make use of medical, religious, and pathological renderings of the body, drawing attention to its varied portrayal as reliant on parallel visual technologies. The navigable and immersive nature of installation is used to suggest a reading of the body as permeable, constructed, and fluid. In the document, these portrayals are discussed via an arthistorical case-study approach, each suggested as varying depictions of bodily permeability. In particular, the Cartesian body as the product of Judeo-Christian morality, the Descartes mind-body split, Enlightenment secularization, and Western medical representation that renders the body as a discrete organism ending at the skin is tracked. The project attempts to unsettle this paradigm by focusing on the dialectic of porosity, which aims to situate the body in dialogue with systems beyond itself via consumption, excretion, and infection. The second aspect of the research is an extrapolation of this porous dialectic to modes of representation and their consequent ways of seeing. The Cartesian bodily paradigm is suggested as parallel to the rise of ocularcentrism. Whilst acknowledging the strengths of various mediums, attention is called to the capacity of static, 2D media to emphasize ocularcentric disembodiment. In contrast, installation is explored as a medium that demonstrates a porous capacity via the viewer's occupation of an immersive environment designed to activate multiple senses, thus aligning message and medium.
Open Access
The fire in the mind: memory, myth & matter
(2024) Vives, Diana; Campbell, Kurt
My MFA project sets out to make fire 'strange' again. That is to say, I foreground intrigue and complexity in the contemplation of common place and metaphorical fires. By crafting artworks as intimate envoys for larger existential concerns and human agency in a world fundamentally mediated by fire, I engage with fire as a generative empirical phenomenon and its accompanying deep theoretical and philosophical heritage. Ever since fire was first harnessed, it has played a pivotal role in shaping human cognition and desire, and consequently, in reshaping the Earth. In my creative process, I bring fire into focus through a lens that is sympa thetic to new materialism, botanical paradigms and neo-animism. My work borrows from the metalanguage of mythology and ancient belief systems to mediate between ideas of conscious and unconscious, memory and imagination, nature and culture, past and present. The essential thread that runs through my research is the ideation of fire as manifest in the mind, body and the object/thing world. Crucially, all the materials used in my artworks are corporeally mediated by fire. Some - like stone - originate from it. Others, like clay or metal, are shaped by it. Wood, however, is central to my material concerns: trees and timber scorched in wildfires feature in my work to symbolise human flesh or the roots of individuals and collectives, bringing with them their own complex histories of climate, displacement and exploitation. These materials, freighted with metaphor, are the means and trigger through which I create carefully crafted, anomalous objects that support lucid and productive itineraries of thought on both 'fire' and 'mind' and the aesthetic that brings them together.
Open Access
The geography of inequality in Cape Town: a case study of access to water in Khayelitsha
(2022) Mokoena, Amanda Mamojaki; Chitonge, Horman
Section 27 (1b) of the Bill of Rights under the Constitution (1996) of the Republic of South Africa states that: “Everyone has the right to have access to sufficient food and water …” This section is preceded by section 26 (1) which states that: “Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing.” Violation of these fundamental human rights in isolation may apply to a vast category of people. However, the residents of Endlovini in Khayelitsha find themselves at the intersection of oppressions informed by the simultaneous infringement of both these rights. For these residents, inequality in access to safe clean drinking water is directly informed by their location and informal housing status. This is a difficult position to be in because the people of Endlovini are neighbours to Litha Park, a recognized formal section of Khayelitsha whose residents enjoy relatively adequate access to quality water, and whose water services are astronomically better than those rendered in Endlovini. This disparity is immediately written off as a class issue. However, this study finds deeper links between geography and water inequality. This study uses John Rawls' theory of justice to highlight water inequality in Cape Town. The study uses qualitative research methodologies through fieldwork conducted in the formal settlement of Litha Park and the informal settlement of Endlovini in Khayelitsha, to illustrate that there are inequalities in how people within the same township access water, but both settlements are still marginalized, compared to the wealthy suburbs of Cape Town. Interviews were conducted with the residents of both settlements, as well as officials from the City of Cape Town's Water and Sanitation Department to gather data and address the research question: “How does the City of Cape Town's response to the water crisis further perpetuate water inequality in the impoverished communities of Khayelitsha?” Key findings revealed that water inequality in Khayelitsha may have been created by apartheid spatial planning, but is sustained by the disregard for poor communities by the local government through unequal, anti-poor service delivery that continues to disenfranchise residents who live in informal settlements through poor water services. The study, whose main objective is to highlight the disparities in water access and services received by the different locations within the township, adds to the body of knowledge on inequality in water access by providing a focused comparison between different kinds of settlements within the same township; to highlight the difficulties in applying Rawls' justice theoretical framework where existing research focuses on comparing townships as a monolith to the suburbs.

Browsing by Subject "fine art"

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