South African Artist Research Articles (Page 1)

This essay analyses the performative photographic series iSana libuyele kuninai by South African artist Buhlebezwe Siwani. The artwork is read as a representation of an artistic exploration that brings Sangoma practices – traditional African healing practices – to the forefront of the urban landscape of a South African township in order to question the still open wounds of Western colonialism and Apartheid regimes.

Taking Maishe Maponya’s biographical play Letta as a starting point, in this article, I explore how exiled Black South African artists who moved to North America in the 1950s and 1960s mediated their yearning for home by finding solidarity with their American counterparts. In Letta, Maponya constructs a historical narrative based on the singer Letta Mbulu’s life to comment on the lives of South African exiles forced to migrate because of apartheid. Unfortunately, Mbulu has not written a biography on her experiences. Due to the nature of close relations while in South Africa and in exile, it is helpful for analysing Maponya’s play that Mbulu features in the biographies written by Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, who also narrate the experiences of a small number of South African artists who formed the core of the exiled group. Upon interacting with Maponya’s play, as well as the texts by Makeba, Masekela, and Keorapetse Kgositsile, it becomes apparent that the exile experience was multilayered (both unhomely and strengthened by solidarity in social and cultural interactions). I propose that Mphahlele’s philosophy of African humanism can explain how Black South African artists were able to navigate and ultimately harmonise their sense of rootlessness as individual immigrants by being part of a mutually supporting, if modest, community diaspora. This enabled them to create a body of work that is still relevant in South African culture.

This article draws on the works of Nurit Bird-David, Graham Harvey, Tim Ingold, and others to argue that new animism, with its emphasis on relational epistemologies, provides an ecological framework that reconfigures how we remember, relate, and resist. Through an analysis of the works of two contemporary South African artists—Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s animist-infused paintings and Koleka Putuma’s relational poetry—the article demonstrates how new animist epistemologies can transform memory work in decolonized forms. Both artists engage with the afterlives of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa, revealing that relationships are not static but emerge continuously through interactions with the earth, matter, and spirit. Their work highlights how decolonization is not only geographically situated but also shaped by broader ecological contexts. By rethinking memory, identity, and resistance through the lens of new animism, this article showcases its potential to challenge and reshape postcolonial narratives.

A significant part of the South African ceramic art history is not the outcome of original scholarly research and writing but, for lack of primary sources, derived from published material in craft publications, the press, and books of public interest. The latter texts typically reflect personal observations rather than citing and contextualising explanatory statements by the ceramists. In this absence of the ceramists' own voices, observations by others tend to assume the status of being definitive of the ceramist's output. This article illustrates the hackneyed earlier observations on the life and oeuvre of the ceramist Henriette Ngako (1943-2021) who was of the Batswana cultural group. Ngako created compositions of stacked, fanciful human and animal forms. Calling on new research findings, some of the claimed influences at play in Ngako's oeuvre are questioned whilst others are contextualised. The article asserts that Ngako exercised agency in breaking with the Batswana cultural tradition of pottery to create novel forms that were unlike any works in the oeuvres of her peers and for which she captured the attention of collectors and gallerists.

ABSTRACT This paper considers two performances engaging (South) Africa’s mineral and creative wealth as decolonial reimaginings, investigating the ways in which scenography is deployed to embody (colonial) extractive practices and subvert still-prevalent global practices of disposability and extractivism. In Bling!, first performed in Vienna in 2024, South African playwright and performer Buhle Ngaba stages the Cullinan diamond’s journey from a South African mine to Buckingham Palace (and back), embodying the tensions between colonial extraction and digital restitution through the figure of Phatsima, an anthropomorphized diamond whose presence oscillates between the live stage and social media platforms. By contrast, Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness by South African artists Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze, and Amy Louise Wilson presents and engages a speculative archive of reclaimed technologies made from discarded or technologically outdated materials, fashioning a futuristic space that reimagines waste as revolutionary and technologies as relational and restorative. Both works address Africa’s extractive colonial histories using innovative scenography, fashioned both physically in the performance venue, as well as virtually through various forms of digital media. In bringing these two performances in conversation, the authors provide critical contemplations on value and waste (diamonds and discarded techno-minerals), digital performance archives and ephemeral stage production, and the physical and virtual possibilities of scenography to embody extraction and counter-exploitative narratives. Furthermore, through our respective perspectives we reflect on the fragmentary nature of what remains in the archive, highlighting the affective limits and subversive possibilities of digitally documenting scenographic elements.

South African nuclear art: a first reflection

This article considers a 2010 government report on the South African visual arts industry. Using a Foucauldian lens, I show how it produces a discourse on ‘gender’ and ‘race’ where these terms function only as quantitative and statistical categories in an administrative and economic art world model. The report presents its findings according to four figures, namely, the ‘white male’, ‘white female’, ‘black male’ and ‘black female’, which I conceptualize as knowledge ‘avatars’ acting as placeholders that obscure the field’s complexity. Despite the use of ‘gender’ and ‘race’ terms identifying various issues in the field, the report’s recommendations to the government virtually ignores the race/gender imbalance so clearly revealed – it is simply folded out of sight or performed away discursively. This phenomenon is explained via Jennifer Tennant Jackson’s concept ‘the efficacity of meta-conceptual performativity’ – how discourses can push things away from the regular knowledge surface (the dispositif) into the ‘fold’.

ABSTRACT Penny Siopis’ Exhibit: Ex Africa (1990), Willie Bester's Sarah Baartman (2000) and Senzeni Marasela's Theodora, Senzeni and Sarah (2010) were each made 10 years apart from one another. In exploring representations of Baartman amongst artists working, respectively, in 1990, 2000 and 2010, the author reveals that each work in some sense responds to discourses about Baartman and ideas about representation current at the time it was made. It is suggested that each maker grappled critically with the profound challenge of visualising a historical figure whose own voice is muted in the archive and is instead known through cartoons, sensationalist newspaper reports and various other accounts often informed by prejudicial attitudes. However, the author argues, the three artists have done so in different ways from each other and in the light of shifting attitudes towards Baartman, varied understandings of the aspects of her narrative that may be deemed important, and changing ideas about the ways most appropriate for registering horror at her treatment.

Senator John McCain may have been on point when he described mixed martial arts (MMA) as “human cock-fighting” in its formative years in the early 1990s in the United States of America (US). Those early MMA contests were no-holds-barred brutal affairs, fought between bloodied combatants of all shapes, sizes and combat styles, in a metal cage. Like bare-knuckle prize-fighting during the 18th and 19th centuries, this new form of combat sport closely resembled a glorified street fight. The sheer brutality of these spectacles ultimately led to the banning of MMA across the US. Realising that MMA’s future depended on governmental sanction and regulation, its organisers actively sought out such sanction and regulation. Although MMA is now legal in all US states, its regulation in both the United Kingdom (UK) and South Africa has lagged behind, raising uncertainty about its legality in these jurisdictions. This uncertainty has been exacerbated by the absence of legislative intervention and judicial scrutiny regarding MMA in both the UK and South Africa. There is, furthermore, a dearth of academic literature addressing this legal lacuna. This study endeavours to bridge that gap by examining the legality of MMA in South Africa. In so doing, guidance is sought from the manner in which the English courts have approached boxing and other activities that entail consensual bodily harm, such as sadomasochism.

ABSTRACT The end of each decade of democracy has seen periods of reflection in the South African visual art world through numerous initiatives, especially exhibitions and book publications. In 2024, after 30 years of democracy, the field is poised for another such moment of introspection. This article considers the first decade of democracy from the perspective of writing in the art world. Through a Constructivist Grounded Theory Method extant text analysis, a reading is conducted across various prominent South African art publications reflecting on the first decade, and these texts are coded to discern the major categories, or themes, that emerge through them, thereby distilling the period’s main features and concerns for influential writers and thinkers in the field at the time as themes. These include, (1) emerging onto the international art scene after the boycott, (2) navigating international demands and local challenges, (3) government failures, (4) presuming equality under democracy and globalism, (5) race and the persistence of white dominance, (6) challenging Western- and Eurocentricism, (7) questioning visual arts education, (8) lacking engagement with art, (9) questions around moving on from resistance art, (10) negotiating and representing identity, and (11) the rise and critique of the gallery system. Not only are the major concerns and their textures succinctly revealed through the rigorous Grounded Theory Method coding process, but their crystallisation also deepens our understanding of how the art world has interacted with the periods of democracy, and which particular sets of preoccupations have informed its discourses.

This article contemplates the life and work of the Oxford-based South African artist and activist Gavin Jantjes, born in 1948 when apartheid officially became the law of the land in South Africa with the National Party’s election to power. Because Jantjes’s understanding of his role as an artist took shape in Cape Town in the 1960s, when every aspect of his life was dominated by the racism of the apartheid state, he has questioned both the incongruities of his life and what his role as an artist has meant, establishing himself as an outspoken and imaginative critic of institutionalized racism and other forms of discrimination. Facing the dual obstacles of race and poverty, as well as the pejorative assumption of the Western European modernist canon that Africans lacked the ability to produce meaningful contemporary visual art, Jantjes engaged head on as an artist and activist with tensions between Western modernism and classical African art and the trope of “primitivism” in Eurocentric art historical discourses. This article foregrounds Jantjes’s multiple roles, both in and outside of the studio and gallery spaces, by examining his paintings, prints, and drawings, as well as material related to his curatorial interventions, writings, and formidable publishing efforts, to reveal pivotal moments in his personal and artistic journeys across five distinct yet overlapping phases of his artistic movement from 1970 to 2023.

In a radio interview in 1964, South African artist Alexis Preller spoke about being able to visualise beauty while undergoing horrifying experiences. The examples that stimulated his imagination in this way were the volcanic eruption he witnessed in the Belgian Congo in 1939 and his experiences as an army medical orderly during WWII. Preller processed these unsettling, traumatic, and extreme experiences throughout his career as a professional artist using the creative action of painting to regain a state of personal emotional equilibrium. In this article, I draw on underutilised sources that record Preller's recollections and those of his one-time partner, Christi Truter, which provide valuable psychological insights into the artist's work. I apply psychoanalyst Sophia Richman's theory of creative action as an instrument for confronting and transcending severe trauma to a discussion of some of Preller's paintings produced in the 1940s after his return to civilian life. In the safe space of his studio, his work facilitated a dissociated state of consciousness, or what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi terms a "flow" experience, which enabled him to witness, transform, externalise, and transcend trauma, promoting recovery, giving meaning to the past, and reconnecting his personal life narrative.

The provision of ART in South Africa has transformed the HIV epidemic, resulting in an increase in life expectancy by over 10 years. Despite this, nearly 2million people living with HIV are not on treatment. The objective of this study was to develop and externally validate a practical risk assessment tool to identify people with HIV (PWH) at highest risk for attrition from care after testing. A machine learning model incorporating clinical and psychosocial factors was developed in a primary cohort of 498 PWH. LASSO regression analysis was used to optimize variable selection. Multivariable logistic regression analysis was applied to build a model using 80% of the primary cohort as a training dataset and validated using the remaining 20% of the primary cohort and data from an independent cohort of 96 participants. The risk score was developed using the Sullivan and D'Agostino point based method. Of 498 participants with mean age 35.7 years, 192 (38%) did not initiate ART after diagnosis. Controlling for site, factors associated with non-engagement in care included being < 35 years, feeling abandoned by God, maladaptive coping strategies using alcohol or other drugs, no difficulty concentrating, and having high levels of confidence in one's ability to handle personal challenges. An effective risk score can enable clinicians and implementers to focus on tailoring care for those most in need of ongoing support. Further research should focus on potential strategies to enhance the generalizability and evaluate the implementation of the proposed risk prediction model in HIV treatment programs.

The interview focuses on South African artist James Webb’s ongoing series There’s No Place Called Home. In this intervention, Webb conceals an audio speaker in a local tree while broadcasting the calls of foreign birds into the public sphere. The artist has made this intervention in more than fifty locations worldwide, every time using a unique birdcall. The interview discusses different aspects of the series, such as site politics, power, listening, and human relations.

The Mundane and the Magical, a sculpture by contemporary South African artist Usha Seejarim, was installed outside the Radisson Red Hotel in Rosebank, Johannesburg, in 2021. Five meters in height, the sculpture consists of two giant red wings constituted from the soleplates of domestic irons. In an interview on May 7, 2024, at her studio, Seejarim discussed the work’s development as well as the choice and treatment of its subject matter with Public Art Dialogue coeditor Brenda Schmahmann. Focusing on the domestic realm, a topic that had been the artist’s central focus since her exhibition Venus at Home (2012), The Mundane and the Magical was also particularly apt in the context of COVID-19, when the oppressiveness of home was often experienced with increased intensity.

On 20 September 1948 the Exhibition of Contemporary South African Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture opened at the Tate Gallery in London. It was organised by the newly formed national arts body, the South African Association of Arts, generously sponsored by the newly elected apartheid government, and hailed to be the first representative exhibition of South African art ever to be held abroad. Beyond its size and position at the Tate, it might, in retrospect, easily be relegated to the status of just a provincial collection of mildly avant-garde work reflecting the European influence and tutelage that most of the artists received. However, a considered study will show that it was a watershed moment for the politics of national art and representation, and for getting South African artists onto an international stage. By considering its local context, the selection process and the local and international responses to this exhibition, this article will provide an assessment of the concerted efforts made by an underdeveloped, colonial art world to promote and export a ‘national’ South African school abroad. It will highlight the exhibition’s critical position in the early development of a local South African art world in four aspects: first, the Tate exhibition evidenced the South African art world’s debut on the international art stage; second, it signified a local shift from privileging European art to preferring South African art; third, it hinted at the advancement in the South African art world toward modernism from academic art; and fourth, but not least, it raised issues of a national art to a national consciousness. Ultimately, the exhibition engendered a prominent public discourse about national art, national identity and representativeness that reached a general audience beyond the art world.

ABSTRACT Part of the project of philosophy is to problematise how the world is known, including destabilising geography as one of the dominant imperialist discourses. In the Afropolis, legacies of colonialism and Apartheid still work to uphold spatial inequality within urban spaces in ways that are both racialised and gendered. Black feminist scholar, Katherine McKittrick, provides a fruitful theoretical foundation to consider postcolonial cities from a renewed epistemological perspective. In the 2006 book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, McKittrick works alongside and across traditional geographies through critical black geographies that centre a black feminist sense of place. In considering ‘a black sense of place’, McKittrick demonstrates how transatlantic slavery enforced and naturalised the connection between blackness and placelessness. She writes to document black women geographies and provides a narrative that locates and draws on black histories and black subjects to ‘make visible social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographic’. This paper places McKittrick in conversation with the work of South African artist Senzeni Marasela through their selected literary and artistic works to explore alternative feminist geographies of Johannesburg’s decommissioned mine slopes/dumps, and to emphasise the liberatory potential of a black feminist point of departure in relation to the mining–industrial complex. The argument is not merely that Johannesburg needs to become more inclusive to black feminist understandings of place, but rather that the centring of black feminist geographical knowledges has the subversive ability to reshape how the city is known in the first place. In doing so, this paper hopes to ‘raise questions about the ground beneath our feet, and how we are all implicated in the production of space’.

South African artist Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 (1997) displays black people’s photographic portraits and text through a slide projection. For this archive project, he collected, restored, and re-contextualized the old portraits and added text. The presented figures depict the black South Africans who lived at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them are well-dressed and take a pose in a European studio. Different from the well-prepared photographic representation, pieces of text include a disorder of alphabets, varied size of letters, inconsistent ground color, and misprinting effect. In a sense, the ambivalent mode of images and text seems to appeal the black people’s inner conflicts between being modernized versus colonized. In fact, Mofokeng once said that such a middle-class of black people did not exist in his education. Thus, this research analyzes the ways in which intertextuality of images and text in The Black Photo Album fills with the incomplete part of South African history. Reconsidering the functional limits of the TRC(Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1995) in South Africa, this research argues that Mofokeng’s archive project delivers emotions of memories of the black people, which were not registered in the nation’s history.

On 3 March 2021, almost a full year after South Africa's theatres were closed due to Covid-19 restrictions, renowned opera soprano Sibongile Mngoma walked into the Johannesburg offices of the South African National Arts Council (NAC) to meet with senior department officials. She was there to demand accountability over their non-payment of promised Covid-19 artist relief funds to the tune of R300 million (roughly USD 16.6 million). When it became apparent that no official would honour the meeting, Mngoma announced her intention to wait. She did not leave the building for another sixty days.

Vladimir Tretchikoff’s impact on the field of South African art in the 1940s and 1950s exemplifies the complexities of navigating between commercial success and artistic recognition. This article argues that Tretchikoff’s strategies anticipate those of twenty-first-century independent artists navigating the contemporary South African art field. Through a comparative analysis with Johannesburg-based contemporary artist and gallery owner Banele Khoza, the study explores how both artists expanded the local art field and challenged its traditional exclusivity. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and symbolic capital, the article examines Tretchikoff’s use of department stores and mass-produced prints alongside Khoza’s self-organised exhibitions, direct collector engagement, as well as his leveraging of digital platforms and social media for promotion and distribution. The digital space has enabled artists like Khoza to cultivate a distinct online persona and narrative attracting broader audiences beyond traditional art world structures. These strategies allow a new generation of independent artists to accumulate social capital through expanded networks, which can be converted into other forms of capital within the art world. This process becomes a key mechanism for creating opportunities and defining an artist’s success and influence. The study will also explore how the art field, shaped by both external forces and internal dynamics, constantly evolves as new actors seek to redefine notions of consecration and legitimacy by manipulating various forms of capital.