South African Artist Research Articles

Transmission and Agreement: Reading and the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel

Transmission and Agreement: Reading and the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel. This paper evaluates the capacity of the contemporary Northern Irish novel to act as an agent of transmission for a ‘post-Troubles’ readership, one distanced by a generation from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that symbolised the partial end of sectarian violence. The critic Liam Harte suggests that “no part of modern Europe (if not the world) has greater claim than Northern Ireland to the mantle of most-narrativized region”, but the transmissive function of fictional works in this context remain under-critiqued. Here, I assess the aspirations of novelistic narrative to cater for what Premesh Lalu has described, in the context of post-apartheid South African art forms, as ‘psychic repair’ (Undoing Apartheid, 2023). The essay engages the 2018 novel Milkman, by Northern Irish author Anna Burns, to ask how fictional narrative transmits the detail of the past across a generation first, in parallel to other literary and artistic genres, and second, in relation to an expanding archive of ongoing legal tribunals and government incentives directed towards the production of an ‘official history’ for Northern Ireland. Through attention to the self-conscious foregrounding of forensic reading practice by Burns and fellow writers, I show the necessary place of fictional recovery in the field of political and cultural memory. Keywords: Troubles, Northern Irish fiction, transmission, memory, generation

A Risk Prediction Model to Identify People Living with HIV Who are High-risk for Disengagement from Care after HIV Diagnosis in South Africa.

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.

A Hack Into Nature: An Interview With James Webb

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: An Interview with Usha Seejarim

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.

Imagining black feminist geographies of Johannesburg through Senzeni Marasela’s creative (un/re)mapping of Johannesburg’s mine slopes

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’.

How to see the South African black people in Santu Mofokeng’s image-text archive?

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.

‘We Will Teach Them How to Use This Building’: Acts of Accountability from South African Artists

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.

Couples motivational interviewing with mobile breathalysers to reduce alcohol use in South Africa: a pilot randomised controlled trial of Masibambisane

IntroductionHeavy alcohol use among people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa can hinder the success of HIV treatment programmes, impacting progress towards United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS goals. Primary partners...

Speaking Back to the Landscape Canon: Cultural Translation in Phumulani Ntuli’s Cloud Migration and the Liewe Land! Exhibition

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that contemporary artists in post-and decolonial contexts are adopting deliberate approaches to respond to and revise canonical art, in what I interpret as acts of cultural translation. Seeing representational practices through this linguistic lens, with concomitant grammars and vocabularies, sheds light on how established conventions may now be challenged through translation—filtering and transforming them. I am particularly interested in the historical South African landscape canon and in how Phumulani Ntuli and several other artists employ different strategies to contest and reimagine the erasures and biases enacted in the canon in their work for the exhibition Liewe Land!. The exhibition was held at the Voortrekker Monument in 2021, and included various artists who all responded to printed reproductions of landscape paintings by historical South African artists. The strategies used by artists that I investigate here include: the reinscribing of people into portrayals of empty colonial landscape scenes, the subversion of pictorial unity and the naturalistic style solidified in the canon through western conventions, and lastly, the use of pre-colonial iconography, grammar, vocabulary and registers of representation that evoke historical relationships between land and people.

The work of art, beside and beyond rights

ABSTRACT How does the work of art mediate the recognitions we give one another in a rights-based order when that order cannot guarantee the rights it promises? What does an account of the open-ended, norm-mediating, performative and socio-aesthetic complexity of the work of art offer this ‘After Rights?’ inquiry? In addressing these questions, I draw on the insights of Jacques Ranciere, Fiona Jenkins, Jean Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, and Sylviya Lechner and Mervyn Frost to argue that the work of art, as a creative and interpretive aesthetic locus, ethically constitutes its practitioners (artists and audiences) as participants in an open-ended norm-mediating risk relation. The argument is that the work of art is an encounter-event practice for performing our commonality beyond power, violence, hierarchy, reason, and rights – even as that work also lends itself, as a beside-rights practice, to the mediation of hidden and discriminatory rights-abusing practices and norms. I do so via a consideration of the work of South African artists which mediate and contest misogynistic, heteronormative and racist discriminations beside and beyond the rights guarantees of the 1996 South African Constitution.

Physical Pain as a Source of Spiritual and Artistic Inspiration in Jackson Hlungwani’s Work

Jackson Hlungwani is a locally recognised South African artist and he is internationally acclaimed with a considerable amount of literature written about his life and work, highlighting his uniqueness distinct rural style (Leibhammer &amp; Nel, 2022) and commercialised value (Lauwrens, 2007: 121-124). He was born around 1923 (according to his grandmother, it was during the time of the Kaiser’s war) (Burnett, 1989: 4). Having acknowledged his contribution to the arts, this paper analyses the man and his work from a different viewpoint, focusing on three aspects of his life namely the human, spiritual and artistic. However, these three aspects should not be considered three independently functioning sides of this man’s existence but three tightly interwoven elements. The research investigates how Hlungwani’s physical pain was embodied in his religious activities and wooden creations and how his suffering, caused by a chronic condition of damaged body tissue, was faced, accepted and assimilated to become a source of spiritual strength supporting his religious ideology and artistic inspiration guiding his remarkable creativity. This study highlights how this South African-born artist dealt with his chronic, somatic condition and turned it from a supernatural condemnation into a source of spiritual strength and creative inspiration. Therefore, through a comparative approach, the study uses relevant published and unpublished biographic material, justified critics and preserved manuscripts in libraries, the media, art museums and exhibitions to unpack the theme of physical pain as a source of spiritual and artistic inspiration in Jackson Hlungwani’s work.

On Migration, Exile, and Cosmopolitanism: A Brief Survey of South African Art Song

One of the genres that comprise the different musics of South Africa is that of the art song. Imported through its European heritage, the art song has found a place in the portfolios of South African composers throughout the twentieth century. However, against the backdrop of its complicated history, South Africa’s art songs often seem to reflect themes of exile, inner struggle and nostalgia. This article contemplates how these themes resonate through South Africa’s complex history, and how they have subsequently been reflected in the genre of art song, with specific reference to songs by composers S. le Roux Marais, Hubert du Plessis, Arnold van Wyk, Peter Klatzow, Hendrik Hofmeyr, and Bongani Ndodana-Breen.

What blind people can teach sighted viewers about art

ABSTRACT While sight and hearing have been privileged in the philosophical formulation of aesthetics, the significance of touch to the experience of art has not enjoyed much attention at all. In order to displace sight and reinstate touch as a viable mode of engagement for the interpretation of visual art, this article reports on a study in which blind individuals and sighted people who were blindfolded were interviewed about their experiences of artworks. The participants were invited to touch selected sculptures in South African artist, Willem Boshoff’s Blind Alphabet (1990 – ongoing) installation. The main aim of the study was to investigate the nature of the tactile aesthetic experience elicited by these sculptures when they are handled and not seen. Secondly, the study aimed to reach a deeper understanding of how tactile engagement with art enriches the experience, meaning and power of the work for both those who can and cannot see. Through the investigation it was revealed that visual art can forge a bridge between individuals with and without blindness.

An Intersectional Reading of Senzeni Marasela’s Work: Making Visible the Marginalised Lived Experiences of Black South African Women in States of Perpetual Waiting

This is a study of the way Senzeni Marasela, a South African artist, uses dress to subvert the invisibility of Black South African women, who have previously been marginalised and restricted to the context of the home and domestic work. This article studies several works across Marasela’s career, with a focus on the immersive performance titled Waiting (October 2013 to October 2019) and Theodorah Comes to Johannesburg (2005). The works are read in terms of their presentation on social media and in their art context. In particular, social media posts made during the six-year performance period of Waiting are studied to ascertain how the act of posting content online is used to further make visible Black South African women living through the effects of apartheid. The purpose of this study is to explore how Marasela narrates a lived experience of Black womanhood in ways that are distinctly layered and intersectional in their adoption of discourse and complex in their presentation to the audience.

Mzansi Magic

Mzansi Magic

Determinants of health-related quality of life in people with Human Immunodeficiency Virus, failing first-line treatment in Africa

BackgroundAntiretroviral treatment improves health related quality of life (HRQoL) of people with human immunodeficiency virus (PWH). However, one third initiating first-line treatment experience virological failure and the determinants of HRQoL in this key population are unknown. Our study aims to identify determinants of among PWH failing antiretroviral treatment in sub-Saharan Africa.MethodsWe analysed data from a cohort of PWH having virological failure (> 1,000 copies/mL) on first-line ART in South Africa and Uganda. We measured HRQoL using the EuroQOL EQ-5D-3L and used a two-part regression model to obtain by-country analyses for South Africa and Uganda. The first part identifies risk factors that were associated with the likelihood of participants reporting perfect health (utility = 1) versus non-perfect health (utility < 1). The second part identifies risk factors that were associated with the EQ-5 L-3L utility scores for participants reporting non-perfect health. We performed sensitivity analyses to compare the results between the two-part model using tobit models and ordinary least squares regression.ResultsIn both countries, males were more likely to report perfect health and participants with at least one comorbidity were less likely to report perfect health. In South Africa, participants with side effects and in Uganda those with opportunistic infections were also less likely to report perfect health. In Uganda, participants with 100% ART adherence were more likely to report perfect health. In South Africa, high HIV viral load, experiencing ART side effects, and the presence of opportunistic infections were each associated with lower HRQoL, whereas participants with 100% ART adherence reported higher HRQoL. In Uganda participants with lower CD4 count had lower HRQoL.ConclusionMarkers of advanced disease (opportunistic infection, high viral load, low CD4), side effects, comorbidities and lack of ART adherence negatively impacted HRQoL for PWH experiencing virological failure.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02787499.

Conceptions of iconicity and their historical reorientations: Pippa Skotnes's horse skeletons and the topos of the Annunciation

How has art practise historically displayed, enhanced and interrogated its contemporaneous definitions of the nature of images? The focus is on the contemporary South African artist, Pippa Skotnes's horse skeletons, in resonance with a constellation of select Renaissance Annunciation paintings, to highlight the impact of the Eucharist and "real presence" on early modern, modern and post-modern notions of what images have been assumed to be. My comparative interpretation of the diverse works distinguishes their peculiar image functions from systematic and historical perspectives. I show that, with the advent of the most sophisticated type of image, the artistic image, images have been refining their own definitions in performative ways. I show in my interpretations of these image-aware meta-artworks, that the Incarnation of Christ as the Imago Dei, as well as changing historical understandings of Christ's image act of the institution of the Eucharist, gradually and radically transformed understandings of the nature of images in the west. I furthermore argue that Skotnes's knowledge, through performative research of indigenous Southern African image traditions of the Khoisan/|Xam, contributes lost historical image dimensions to her work, and augments current understandings of images and art, at a time when plenary experiences of time, and historical and cultural density, are appreciated. For me, Skotnes's work artistically performs Paul Ricoeur's philosophical assumption that continuous and persistent historical reorientations of ancient sacred symbolism of the natural world remain at the root of, and infinitely augment, contemporary conceptions of the 'figurative' (Ricoeur 1967:10-18) - or by extension, of what images and art are. In the contemporary South African artist's work, the beauty and complexity of diverse simultaneous cultural and geographical notions of what images are and have been, are staged. Like the Renaissance Annunciation paintings, her "bone books" splendidly contribute to the process of differentiating and articulating discursive definitions of what images have been conceived to be.

Generalizing the “Masterpiece Effect” in fine art pricing: Quantile Hedonic regression results for the South African fine art market, 2009–2021

Generalizing the “Masterpiece Effect” in fine art pricing: Quantile Hedonic regression results for the South African fine art market, 2009–2021

African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016)

African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016)

Resistance is common in paediatric patients failing ART in South Africa.

Minimal data exist on HIV drug resistance patterns and prevalence among paediatric patients failing ART in resource-limited settings. We assessed levels of HIV drug resistance in children with virological failure. This cross-sectional study, performed from March 2017 to March 2019 in South Africa, enrolled HIV-positive children aged ≤19 years, receiving ART through public health facilities with recent evidence suggestive of virological failure (at least one viral load ≥1000 copies/mL), across 45 randomly selected high-volume clinics from all nine provinces. Resistance genotyping was performed using next-generation sequencing technologies. Descriptive analysis taking into account survey design was used to determine outcomes. Among 899 participants enrolled, the adjusted proportion of HIV drug resistance among children with virological failure was 87.5% (95% CI 83.0%-90.9%). Resistance to NNRTIs was detected in 77.4% (95% CI 72.5%-81.7%) of participants, and resistance to NRTIs in 69.5% (95% CI 62.9%-75.4%) of participants. Overall, resistance to PIs was detected in 7.7% (95% CI 4.4%-13.0%) of children. HIV drug resistance was highly prevalent in paediatric patients failing ART in South Africa, with 9 in 10 patients harbouring resistance to NNRTIs and/or NRTIs. PI-based regimens are predicted to be highly efficacious in achieving virological suppression amongst patients failing NNRTI-based regimens. Scaling up resistance testing amongst patients would facilitate access to second- and third-line regimens in South Africa.