Browsing by Subject "fine arts"

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    BOGASATSWANA: redbuilding the boat while sailing
    (2020) Phetogo, Thebeyame; Mackenny, Virginia
    Bogasatswana: Rebuilding the Boat while Sailing, is an attempt to both transmit and disrupt a story-world whose make-up is based on my country of origin, Botswana. It is an exercise in worldbuilding through painting, wherein I establish post-colonial Botswana as a fictional place through the interrogation of gaps within the historicised national myths of the country and locate myself in said place and medium as a subject in the contemporary moment. Rather than the presentation of a fully realized fictional world, this project privileges the attempt at articulating a subjective world-version as informed by my positionality. As with solving a mathematical equation, I endeavour to show my working in the making visible of this space.
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    Re-presenting historical trauma: art-making and the affective imagination
    (2025) Washkansky, Dale; Campbell, Kurt; Siopis, Penelope
    Starting with an inquiry into what I speculate to be a portrait family photograph from 1941 taken amidst one of Nazi Germany's mass murder operations in Liepāja, Latvia, I encounter a young girl who looks to the ground and hides her face. Due to this visual obfuscation I direct a plea for her to look up and meet my gaze. The question as to why this photograph was taken shortly before their execution looms large. My yearning to see the young girl's face and know more, coming to some understanding about the circumstances and the people therein, was the impetus to my artistic response – the work of imagining beyond the frame to explore its hauntingly grievous impact. By deploying certain strategies, art, I argue, can offer a novel means to reposition traumatic historical events outside the determinisms associated with conventional practices of historiography, which quell their disruptive temporality, so that they can enter the ambiguous realm of subjective inquiry, where they remain contingent, indeterminate, and open-ended. In search for strategies, I analyse a selection of artworks by Penny Siopis and Anton Kusters that respectively utilise the mediums of film and photography. I discuss how their artworks challenge conventional representations of historical traumas by rousing the forces of the imagination and affect so that each viewer becomes a participant within the indefinite process of making meaning. Crucial strategies that I identify include: activating the vibrant opacity of materiality, haptics, discontinuous narratives, and the dialectics of montage, all of which emphasise particularity, where the subjective imbricates with the historical, social, and cultural. I argue that these strategies demonstrate how the image is never fully formed or static for observational interpretation, but always relational and orientated towards an anterior future, engendering an encounter with heterogeneous, multidirectional time that problematises and disrupts causal chronological logic. Following which, by applying these strategies within my own artistic practice, I demonstrate how the plea, the original point of obfuscation, is thus transformed by my practice from a desire to see into a highly generative re-discovery of the photograph's affective relationality, thus arguing for art's capabilities to potentialise knowledge from un-knowing.
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    Transnational identity, historical entanglements and the living archive: between Medu & me
    (2021) Makin, Kim Karabo; Campbell, Kurt
    The doors of culture shall be opened is an audio-visual exhibition and self-reflexive research project that unpacks transnational identity, historical entanglements, and the living archive, through Medu Art Ensemble as the case in point. The project expands on the relationship ‘between Medu and Me', as a method of engaging fragments of the archive, the construction of history, and identity formation across Botswana and South Africa. As the culmination of research and fieldwork in Gaborone and Cape Town from 2019 to 2021, the title of the exhibition references a Medu poster once housed in the University of Cape Town's Special Collections Library. The project aims to unpack and sound a space that centres dislocation, by providing some analysis of the post-traumas of Botswana in the anti-Apartheid struggle, with an emphasis on lived experiences, as well as oral traditions of storytelling and radio. The exhibition and accompanying research document work together to present creative and scholarly ideation of the relationship between art and history in contemporary Botswana and South Africa. With a look at history as circular and cyclical, the project uses a narrative tone in order to engage in an open dialogue with fragments of the archive. In this way, I map the interconnected timelines of individual and collective memory, using photography, sound, installation and sculpture (namely ceramics and assemblage). With a focus on Medu, I engage an extended conversation of Botswana's national history as entangled with aspects of South Africa's. By tracing a coming-of-age story of identity formation across neighbouring nation-states, I simultaneously unpack transnational identity through an exploration of the living archive. With a look at sound as spatialised and socialised, I reengage the interlocutors of history, as in circular motion with my individual present and collective future.