Episodes
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In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Dr Ralph Borland, an independent artist-researcher and curator based in Cape Town. Ralph has a degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town, a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. His PhD was a critique of first world design interventions in the developing world. His subsequent post-doctoral work at UCT focused on the African city and North-South knowledge inequalities. He has continued to purse his interest in democratisation and the creative use of emerging technologies with projects such as African Robots, his collaboration with Southern African street artists where he helped them introduce electronics and mechanics to their practice. His art-design piece, Suited for Subversion, a protective and performance suit for street protest in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. He co-curated the exhibition Design and Violence at the Science Gallery in Dublin in 2016 and Future Present: Design in a Time of Urgency at the Science Gallery in Detroit. He has just completed a fellowship in the Institute for Humanities in Africa at UCT which he concluded with the exhibition Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa which featured the remarkable collaborative work BoneFlute which we discuss in some detail in this podcast.
In this podcast, we discuss how Ralph came to art practice and his first degree, majoring in sculpture, in Fine Art at Michaelis. We examine his lateral move into electrical engineering with his PhD at Trinity and the curatorial work he did at the Dublin Science Gallery. We then unpack in detail his most recent collaborative, and ongoing artistic research project, with the orthopaedic surgeon Dr Rudolph Venter, the flutist, Alessandro Gigli, and the film-maker Dara Kell. Finally we consider the relationship between artistic practice, research, and activism. Ralph Borland's artist's home page · information around Ralph's exhibition AIAIA – Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa, which showed art-research work from my fellowship on the Future Hospitals project at HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town · Bone Flute - Brief - 2024.pdf — PDF (5.4 MB) -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Miranda Moss, a South African artist, outsider-engineer, eco-geek, and rogue educator who is currently based in Sweden. Miranda’s transdisciplinary practice, which focuses on the problematics and hopeful possibilities of technology from a socio-ecological and anticolonial feminist perspective, has seen her exhibit, teach, and perform research internationally in a variety of art, science, community, academic, public, and hacker spaces.
Miranda graduated with a Bachelor of Art in Fine Art, with a distinction in sculpture from the Michaelis School of Art, UCT, in 2012 . In 2017, she was the recipient of the Pro Helvetia / Artists-in-Labs residency, where she was stationed in a phytopathology laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow, Forest and Landscape near Zurich, investigating the colonial weight of “invasive alien” microorganisms. In 2020, she was awarded the konS Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art’s project production grant alongside collaborator Daniel Brownell, for a work reimagining factory farming and robotics and working alongside agri-tech scientists.
In 2021, she completed a Masters degree in Sustainable Design at LNU in Sweden, where her thesis project, “Power Harvest; explorations in regenerative energy technologies within the (post) colonial climate emergency” involved distilling cutting edge scientific experiments into poetic, artistically articulated, and accessible forms of engagement. The project entailed developing a low-cost, DIY system for making electricity, fertilizer, and safely-treated water from human urine, in response to the oppressive technocoloniality inherent in post apartheid South Africa’s straining electrical, water, and sanitation urban grid systems.
She has just embarked on a 3 year long collaborative research project titled “Regenerative Energy Communities; artistic and collective energy experiments for resilient agriculture” funded by the Swedish Energy Agency’s Program for Energy, People, and Society.
In this podcast, we discuss how Miranda came to art practice and her first degree in Fine Art at Michaelis. We also examine her engagement with scientific research and her understanding of art as a form of research. We then explore, in some depth, her experience as an artist based in the laboratories of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape in Zurich and the impact that this had on her understanding of art and research. Finally, we unpack the work she did for her MA in Sustainable Design and her move into the world of Regenerative Energy and the potential applications of this thinking in South Africa. The outcome of Miranda MA's project · Miranda's post Arist-in-Lab (AiL) residency exhibition · Miranda's own website · Regenerative Energy Communities, Växjoö, Sweden -
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In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty speaks to Professor Nathaniel Stern, an artist, writer and teacher who holds a 50/50 dual appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as a Professor in Art and Design and Mechanical Engineering where “he teaches artists how to engineer, engineers how to art, and everyone how to sustain their work with entrepreneurial thinking.”
Nathaniel’s most recent art project, a travelling exhibition, called "The World After US (TWAU): Imaging techno-aesthetic futures", is a fascinating and constantly mutating physical melange of botany and discarded electronics that challenges viewers to imagine “what our digital media will be and do in the world after us”. One aspect of the TWAU project, called "The Wall After Us", was was recently featured as part of the SYM|BIO|ART exhibition at University of Johannesburg. The exhibition launched the newly formed Creative Microbiology Research Co-Lab at the University of Johannesburg led by Prof Leora Farber.
Nathaniel also has a long association with Johannesburg and the Wits School of Arts. With a Masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, he was responsible for designing and teaching the first years of the Interactive Media studio programme in the Digital Arts department. Over that time he also won the Brett Kebble Art Award in both 2003 and 2004, thus earning the first recognition for interactive and digital art in the South African art world. Following his time in Johannesburg, he went on to do a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland writing his dissertation on interactive art and embodiment.
Since his PhD, Nathaniel has created a dazzling range of exploratory art projects, often in collaboration with other artists, scientists and engineers. In fact the journal Scientific American says Stern’s art is “tremendous fun,” and “fascinating” in how it is “investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art.” I urge listeners to visit his website to get a grasp of the extent of his artistic and writerly practice. In this discussion, we talk about the TWAU project; and the experience of installing the "The Wall After Us" working remotely from the US together with the curatorial team at the FADA gallery. We also explore Nathaniel’s thinking about aesthetics and the relationship between aesthetics and activism, especially the climate activism that is central to his work. Finally we unpack the Startup Challenge which Nathaniel directs at Lubar Entrepreneurship Centre at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. I think that the expanded notions of both innovation and entreprepreneurship that Nathaniel deploys in the programme are of great value for similar work at Wits, and in South Africa more broadly.
Useful links to Nathaniel’s website, books, exhibitions, and papers:
His website: https://nathanielstern.com
His latest published paper, together with Johannes Lehmann and Rachel Garber-Cole: "Novelty and Utility: How the Arts May Advance Question Creation in Contemporary Research". Leonardo (2023) 56 (5): 488–495. DOI https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02400
The TWU site, with downloadable PDF of the exhibition catalogue and a video documentary: https://nathanielstern.com/text/2020/catalog-the-world-after-us/
https://nathanielstern.com/artwork/documentary-the-world-after-us/
Nathaniel's first book, with downloadable intro chapter:
Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics
https://nathanielstern.com/text/2018/ecological-aesthetics/
The Lubar Entrepreneurship Centre webpage: https://uwm.edu/lubar-entrepreneurship-center/student-startup-challenge/# -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty speaks to Professor Bruce Barton the Director of the University of Calgary’s School of Creative and Performing Arts, and the Co-Artistic Director (with Pil Hansen) of Vertical City, an interdisciplinary performance hub they co-founded in Toronto in 2007.
Bruce is a teacher and theorist of artistic research and is also a top creative practitioner. He has extensive experience as a director, playwright, dramaturg, and designer with numerous intermedial performance companies across Canada and internationally. In addition he has published widely and edited both major peer-reviewed and professional journals and is the editor/contributor of seven books, most recently the seminal collections, Performance as Research: Methodology, Knowledge, Impact in 2017 and At the Intersection between Art and Research in 2010.
Bruce has also been very active in scholarly organisations. He was the founder and co-convenor of the “Articulating Artistic Research” Seminar at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research,IFTR, which he began in 2012. He is also a co-convenor of the Performance as Research Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research and the Artistic Research Working Group of Performance Studies international (PSi). It was his involvement with these organisations that brought him to Africa last month where he participated in the first African IFTR Conference in Ghana, followed by the first African PSi Conference held in Johannesburg, and hosted by the Wits School of Arts.
Christo caught up with him shortly after his return to Canada to discuss his experience of the two conferences in two different African cities, the differences between the IFTR and PSi and the value of such scholarly organisations to emerging scholars. We then untangle the terminology around Performance as Research and Artistic Research before considering Bruce's key terms for evaluating Artistic Research: Methods, Knowledge, and Impact. Finally we explore the very exciting work that he has done, with his creative partner, Pil Hansen, with the Vertical City Performance in Toronto, particularly their innovative engagements using performance into the fields of cognitive science,and cognitive philosophy. Performance Research Knowledge · Vertical City Performance · International Federation for Performance Research · Perfromance Studies International -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Prof Tanja Sakota, an artistic researcher, writer, and filmmaker in the Department of Film & Television in the Wits School of Arts. Tanja is the author of an important new book, just published by Wits University Press, called Uncovering Memory: Filming in South Africa, Germany, Poland, and Bosnia/Herzegovina.
Tanja has had more than 20 years of experience in the academic teaching of film and television, and Uncovering Memory is her first book publication. I’ve been looking forward to talking to her about her book, which appeared in March 2023, because I regard it as an important advance in the application of artistic research in South Africa. In this discussion we unpack her account of the ways that she uses the camera as a tool for research to uncover memory traces as they become accessible through architecture, sites and locations in landscape and city spaces.
A striking aspect of her approach as a researcher and practitioner is how her practice draws directly from the learnings she has derived from her problem-based teaching in the classroom with South African and European students and academic peers, notably in the wake of the #FeesMustFall protests which disrupted Wits campus in 2015/16. Her research practice is also informed by the deeply personal experience of trauma, both her parent’s shattering experiences of trauma as children during the final years of WWII in Europe and her own personal experience of trauma while she was undertaking this research. We examine the way that these traumatic experiences, both transgenerational and personal, motivated her turn towards auto ethnography and the manner in which she has blurred the boundaries of theory and practice with modes of creative writing in the production of her book. Finally we discuss her trajectory, over the course of her research and writing, from a notion of practice-based research to artistic research.
Useful links to the films discussed in this podcast and Tanja's book can be found in the show notes below. Tanja's book, Uncovering Memory, published by Wits University Press · The Wits student film discussed in the podcast: Lurking Silhouettes by Shubham Metha. · The Wits student film discussed in the podcast: Johannes comes to Town by Boitumelo Molalugi · Tanja's research film, Shattered Reflections, as discussed in the podcast and her book. -
In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Doris Bloom, a multidisciplinary South African artist who has been based in Denmark since 1976. She currently has a major exhibition called Bird Bone Whistler at the Origins Centre Museum in Johannesburg until 02 July 2023.
Doris was born on a farm outside Vereeniging and her deep imaginative engagement with the African landscape has powerfully informed her work over the last 46 years. She began her career by studying ceramics at the Johannesburg College of Art and then a Masters in contemporary art at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen. She is best known as a painter and printmaker as well as a performance artist, often performing in front of her finished works or, as she did at the opening of her Origins Centre exhibition, creating an artwork in front of her audience. Doris has received numerous awards and public commissions and has exhibited internationally.
In this discussion we talk about the path she followed to become an artist, and explore her movement into performance in 2003 and the way that she has mapped a visceral discourse of body, language and memory. We also examine the ways in which her work engages with the sciences of palaeontology and archeology and the significance of visual technologies such as VR for her practice as an artist working in collaborative performance.
The online catalogue for Bird Bone Whistler is available at https://www.birdbonewhistler.com/ Catalogue - Bird Bone Whistler · Information about the Origins Centre Exhibition of Bird Bone Whistler -
In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty, the Chair of Research in the Wits School of Arts, speaks to Dr Sela Adjei, a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and curator from Ghana and a leading proponent of a distinctly African approach to artistic research. Sela has degrees in communication design and African art and culture from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and received his PhD in African studies from the University of Ghana, Legon. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Media, Arts and Communication in Ghana. He has participated in over 20 exhibitions and curated several high profile exhibitions and art festivals. His latest exhibition, Zadokeli, the Ewe word for eclipse, is a collaboration with the poets Mawuli Adsei and Elikplim Akorli. It opens on the 25th May at the Museum of Science and Technology in Acra. For those of us not able to get to Acra, a number of selected paintings (Black Power Series) complemented bye Elikplim Akorli’s spoken word poetry will form a virtual component of the exhibition in order to reach a wider global audience
Sela’s work as an artistic researcher first came to our attention with a paper he presented at the ARA2020 Conference in Johannesburg. Entitled "The Philosophy of Art in Ewe-Vodu Religion", in his paper he described his engagement with the Ewe-Vodu belief system through a combination of auto-ethnography and his own artistic practice. In the field of artistic research which is so dominated by paradigms developed in the Global North, Sela’s paper was a flash of light from a genuinely African perspective. Not only did Sela’s paper seek to integrate African art, philosophy and indigenous knowledge systems into modern art practices. He also described the spirtual paradigm shift that he went through as a result of his artistic research.
In this conversation, we explore Sela’s journey as an artist and researcher, and examine the challenge of engaging with forms of esoteric knowledge in Africa that do not reveal themselves to outsiders. We also look at the impact the American/Black Lives Matter and the endSARS protests in Nigeria on Sela’s work and how this manifests in his latest collaborative exhibition, Zadokeli. -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Jayne Batzofin, the digital archivist on the Reimagining Tragedy from African and the Global South (RETAGS) project. This performance-as-research project is being led by Prof. Mark Fleishman with Mandla Mbothwe in the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at University of Cape Town. The project seeks to create space for an extended interrogation of the vast body of tragic works produced in the theatres of Africa, using performance methodologies as analytical tools to gain purchase on the complex realities of the colonial aftermath. It does this by investigating current events in the postcolony beyond the theatre, through the “prism of tragedy”.
Of particular relevance to the theme of this podcast, the RETAGS project endeavours to challenge the Eurocentric biases and preconceptions of Theatre Studies in two respects: firstly by shifting the perspective to Africa and the Global South thereby challenging the assumptions that align with what has been the predominant perspective in Theatre Studies; and secondly, by engaging in art practice as a mode of research in a central way alongside other more conventional research modes and methods challenging its predominant methodologies.
Jayne Batzofin’s work as the digital archivist on the RETAGS project has been crucial to documenting and making available the rehearsal and development processes in the project. In other words treating the entire process as a mode of research. In this podcast we discuss the challenges of undertaking the documentation, including the ethical and IP issues that have arisen when recording both rehearsals and performances and the scrupulously careful approach that Jayne has taken towards this work. We also examine the larger implications of the digital archiving process and whether or not it could be understood as a resistance to or extension of the ever expanding digital surveillance state. Finally we look at the vast amount of material that gets generated through digital documentation, and Jayne’s views on the potential of AI for dealing with this problem. For links to the digital archive and to more information about this important project, please visit at the RETAGS website. -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Prof David Andrew, from the Department of Fine Arts in the Wits School of Arts.
We focus on the relationship between arts pedagogies and artistic research looking at his background as an arts teacher, the formative influence of his education in both South Africa and Swaziland during apartheid, the way that he has sought to bring the concept of the artist’s sensibility into both arts education and research, and his own work as a researcher and supervisor of postgraduate artistic research.
David has served both as Head of the Fine Arts Department and Deputy-Head of the School. He studied for his BA Fine Arts at the University of Natal and earned his PhD at Wits with a research project entitled "The artist’s sensibility and multimodality: classrooms as works of art". David is a practising artist and lectures in Fine Arts and Arts Education courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His interest in the artist-teacher relationship has led to a number of projects aimed at researching, designing and implementing alternative paths for the training of arts educators and artists working in schools. Notably his joint co-ordination of the Curriculum Development Project Trust-Wits School of Arts partnership that developed the Advanced Certificate in Education (Arts and Culture) and the Artists in Schools and Community Art Centres programmes. His current research interests include the tracking of histories of arts education in South Africa and southern Africa more broadly; the Another Road Map School Africa Cluster research project with researchers across Africa; the On Location research project with the Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm, Sweden; and the reimagining of the arts school, arts pedagogies and artistic research in the context of the Global South. In March 2017 he co-convened the ArtSearch International Symposium on Artistic Research in Johannesburg. He has presented at numerous conferences including the InSEA Conference in Budapest, Hungary (July 2011) and the Arts in Society Conference also in Budapest, Hungary, (June 2013) and the Arts Research Africa International Conferences (Johannesburg, South Africa, 2020 and 2022). -
In this concluding podcast of the Mellon funding cycle, the ARA podcast's technical producer (and journalist) Elna Schutz hosts a discussion with the key members of the ARA project about what was achieved, what was learnt, and what opportunities were missed during the 5 + 1 years of the Mellon grant.
Prof Brett Pyper, the ARA principle investigator; Zanele Madiba, the project co-ordinator; and Prof Christo Doherty, the project director open up about the project which sought to develop artistic research in the Wits School of Arts and to advance the understanding of what this approach can mean in an African context. -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Leora Farber Associate Professor and Director of the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg . Under Leora’s leadership the Centre has become a vibrant hub where an international community of visiting professors, research associates, and postdoctoral fellows have conducted interdisciplinary research over the last fifteen years around the theme of African and African diasporic histories and identities; with visual practice and questions of representation at the centre of their investigations. Recently Leora has opened up a new thematic current at the centre exploring the connections between art, design and the life sciences through a bio lab due to be launched in 2023. We explore both currents in this podcast.
In addition to directing the VIAD Centre, Leora is an artist, academic, editor, curator and post-graduate supervisor. She obtained a BA Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, followed by an MA Fine Art (cum laude) also from Wits, and then DPhil in Visual Art at the University of Pretoria. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with interdisciplinary works that deal with the concerns of the body, embodiment, abjection, and activities historically associated with women’s work and domestic objects. A strongly feminist thematic which she has pursued since her first performance installation, entitled A Room of Her Own, as The Premises in Johannesburg in 2006.
In this discussion we explore Leora’s personal trajectory and education as an artist and her early practice as a lecturer in Fine Arts. We look the reasons for the establishment of The Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg in 2007, the vision that Leora had for the Centre and the ways in which the planned research was actualised. We then discuss the important colloquium "On Making: Integrating Approaches to Practice-Led Research in Art and Design" that Leora organised at VIAD in 2009. The colloquium was the first gathering to explicitly explore the impact and implications of practice-led research in the South African context but also brought a wide range of European perspectives into the conversation.
We then examine Leora’s move into an engagement with bioart, her initial collaborations with bioscientists at the University of Johannesburg, and her residency in 2019 on the SymbiotikA programme at the University of Western Australia. We explore whether bioart is a break with the concerns articulated by the work at VIAN or if it takes these concerns further into the ambit of post humanist and new materialism and we assess the implications of this work for the decolonial project.
Useful links:
The VIAD website: https://www.viad.co.za/
The "On Making" conference proceedings. All papers available as downloadable PDFs: https://www.viad.co.za/edited-volume-imaging-ourselves
The SymbiotikaA website with details of Leora's 2019 residency: https://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/ -
In this special episode in the ARA podcast series, Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to three internationally acclaimed and award-winning artists about their creative research into the possibilities of the book as an artwork. Veronica Schapers, Robbin Amy Silverberg, and Julie Chen are showing a range of their artists books in a spell-binding new exhibition at the Jack Ginsberg Centre for the Book Arts housed in the Wits Arts Museum.
Entitled "Creative Research: The Artists’ Books of Schapers, Silverberg, and Chen", the exhibition runs till the 15th December. The reason I grabbed the opportunity to speak to these three artists, while they were in Johannesburg, is because creative research is central to their practice but in fascinatingly different ways. Through their diverse artists’ books they explore the complexities of personal and inter-cultural positions, language, and meaning-making through being.
Veronika Schäpers was born in Coesfeld, Germany. She was trained as a bookbinder for three years before she studying for a diploma in painting and books at the University of Art & Design in Halle, Germany. After a three months scholarship with the Centro del bel Libro, Ascona in Switzerland, followed by a nine months scholarship with Naoaki Sakamoto in Tokyo, she began her career in 1998 as a free-lance book artist and working from her own studio in Tokyo. In 2012, Schäpers moved back to Germany and now lives and works in Karlsruhe .
In her practice, Veronica explores a wide range of materials that offer visual and tactile solutions through the sensual medium of the book.
Robbin Amy Silverberg is the founder of both Dobbin Mill, a hand-papermaking studio, and Dobbin Books, an artists' book studio, both in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Princeton University with a BA Cum Laude in Art History in 1980 and began making her own paper in 1980. Since then Robbin has created great number of artists' books—both on her own and in collaboration with other artists, all over the U.S., Canada, Europe, and South Africa.
Robin’s books embody her research into paper as her preferred material and as a vehicle for the multisensory experience of touch, reading and the transfer of ideas.
Julie Chen was born in Inglewood, California. She completed an undergraduate degree in printmaking at the University of California, Berkeley in 1984.[1] She subsequently became interested in book arts and got a degree in book arts from Mills College in 1989. She began teaching book arts at Mills College as an adjunct in 1996 and became an associate professor in 2010.
Julie has achieved prominence by creating conceptually sophisticated works that combine traditional techniques, such as letterpress printing and hand bookbinding, with more modern technologies such as photopolymer plates and laser cutting. She is known for pushing the structural boundaries of the artist's book with a range of architectural and sculptural approaches.
At one point you will also hear the voice of Jack Ginsberg himself, explaining the after-exhibition access that is possible for visitors to this unique collection of artists books, one of the most comprehensive in the world.
Please note that this recording was done by myself with a single microphone in the Jack Ginsberg Centre. As a result, the sound quality is not great, but I hope the content is of sufficient interest to make listening to this special ARA podcast worthwhile.
Follow these links for further information:
Website of The Jack Ginsberg Centre for the Book Arts
http://www.theartistsbook.org.za/
The artist's own websites with images and information about their book art practice:
Veronika Schäpers
http://www.veronikaschaepers.net/en/
Robbin Amy Silverberg
https://www.robbinamisilverberg.com/
Julie Chen
https://flyingfishpress.com/ -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Prof Brett Pyper, the Principal Investigator on the ARA project and the leader of a major interdisciplinary research project based on popular manifestations of jazz culture in South Africa. Currently called the Cosmopolitan Collective, the project has evolved over the last 17 years from an initial study of township jazz appreciation societies in urban Gauteng, through a creative engagement with jazz cosmopolitanism in Accra in Ghana, to become a multi-facetted research project that is using a range of creative methodologies to explore and expand the status of jazz as heritage in South Africa.
Currently an Associate Professor in the History of Art department in the Wits School of Arts, Brett is a cultural practitioner, arts administrator, festival director, music researcher and academic. He grew up in Pretoria, now Tswane, and completed an interdisciplinary BA in music and cultural studies at the University of South Africa. He began his career as a facilitator of developmental music projects during the transition from apartheid, before taking up a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US, where he was based for six years. He holds a Master’s degree in Public Culture from Emory University in Atlanta, and a PhD in Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies from New York University. Between 2005 and 2007 he headed the Division of Heritage Studies and Cultural Management in the Wits School of Arts, incorporating the Centre for Cultural Policy and Management. From 2008 to 2013, he was CEO of the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (Absa KKNK), one of South Africa’s major festivals of art, popular and vernacular culture, which takes place annually at Easter time in the town of Oudtshoorn in the rural Western Cape. He returned to the Wits in 2014 to take up the headship of the School of Arts, which he led until 2021.
In this discussion we cover the influence of Prof Steven Feld’s "Jazz Cosmopolitanism" project in Accra, and the ways in which the South African project was a response to Feld’s work with Ghanian musicians. We look at the impact of the Covid-19 restrictions which scuppered the planned collaboration between Accra and the Johannesburg and the reasons for the choice of Cosmologies as the working title for the South African project. We examine the ways that the project managed the Covid restrictions for their ground-breaking 2020 live concert at Wits, involving creative contributions from staff and students together with South African jazz musicians. We discuss the contribution made to the concert by the local “diga” dance improvisors and significance of such embodied responses for the post-apartheid cultural project in South Africa. We then unpack the surprising motivation for renaming the project as the Cosmopolitan Collective and look more closely at the four distinct streams of practice that have come to be featured in the research collaboration of the Collective.
Useful links:
Prof Steven Feld's book - https://www.dukeupress.edu/jazz-cosmopolitanism-in-accra
Brett Pyper's paper, Jazz Festivals and the Post-Apartheid Public Sphere: Historical Precedents and the Contemporary Limits of Freedom https://www.jstor.org/stable/44651151
Gwenn Ansell's review of the historic 2020 Cosmologies concert at Wits University - https://www.newframe.com/life-in-jazz-notes-and-rhythm/
Wadee Ranoto's video clip of "diga" performance at the Cosmologies concert - https://youtu.be/_sK7XqnNzyA -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to donna Kukama, a South African born interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, works on canvas, sculptural objects, video, and site-specific installation. The underlying topic of this conversation is how donna uses performance art and other practices as tools for artistic research, elaborating a challenging critique of the existing narratives of history and traditional modes of storytelling.
Donna currently has a solo exhibition at the Wits Art Museum, entitled "Ways-of-Remembering-Existing" which runs until the 5th of November.
Donna was born in Mafikeng, in the then South African homeland of Boputsawana in 1981. After completing a Fine Arts degree at the Tswana University of Technology, she studied for a Masters in Public Art in Switzerland. She was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art in 2014 and has gone on to exhibit and present performances at a range of prestigious national and international galleries and museums including the Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp, the nGbk in Berlin, the New Museum in New York, and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town. She is currently the Professor of Contemporary Art in the Global South at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany.
In this conversation, we explore donna’s personal trajectory as an artist, and her experience of different kinds of arts education in South Africa and Europe. We also discuss her Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art, the impact this had on her career and the significance of performance art in post-apartheid South Africa.
We then concentrate on the interrogation of history in donna’s work, and the collaborative research project, the Centre for Historical Re-enactments, which she initiated during her time as a lecturer at Wits together with Gabi Ngcobo and Kemang Wa Lehulere.
We also examine donna’s radical conception of written histories, which in her practice is not limited to the physical form of bound pages in book, but moves through rumour, memory, performance, drawing, sculptural objects, installations and sound.
Finally, we unpack the creative process behind her video/performance work “The Swing (After after Fragonard) from 2009. The Swing is one of the 4 video pieces featured at her WAM exhibition. I had understood that the work was a complex critical reconfiguration of two previous works, the 18th Century Rococo painting The Swing by Fragonard, and then Yinka Shonibare’s decolonial installation from 2001 called The Swing (after Fragonard), but I had no idea of what went into the creation of donna’s work or the dramatic personal consequences for her of the performance on a swing high above Mai-Mai market in downtown Johannesburg.
Important links:
donna's WAM exhibition info: https://www.wits.ac.za/wam/exhibitions/
donna's video, The Swing (after after Fragonard): https://vimeo.com/202671614
Her gallery representation in SA:
https://blankprojects.com/Donna-Kukama-Bio
Nontobeko Ntombela's essay on donna and Reshma Chhiba's performance art: https://www.academia.edu/73685573/Silent_Toyi_Toyis_in_the_work_of_Donna_Kukama_and_Reshma_Chhiba
donna's Instagram with a wealth of images and videos of her work. https://www.instagram.com/kukama_wa_kukama/?hl=en -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Tracey Rose, currently Senior Lecturer in the Fine Arts department in the Wits School of Arts, and internationally renowned as an artist who works across a range of practices, but most notably as a performance artist using her body.
Tracey’s work has recently been featured in a major retrospective exhibition at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. Curated by the new Director of the Zeitz, Koyo Kouoh, the exhibition was called Shooting Down Babylon (The Art of War). The title references one of the works on the exhibition, an installation which reflects on exorcist and cleansing rituals from non-western communities.
In this discussion, we look at Tracey’s trajectory as a radical artist, activist and provocateur, from her upbringing and early schooling in Durban, and her arts education at Wits where she qualified for a BA in Fine Arts before studying for an MA at Goldsmiths College in London. We touch her on exhibition at the Zeitz Mocaa but go into greater depth into her use of photography and video, both significant aspects of her artistic practice overshadowed in the critical discourse by the dynamic physicality of her performance work.
We also discuss the way that she is recognised on the international scene as a black African artist, but how in South Africa that identity is burdened by the still active apartheid definition of “coloured”. We then go some way towards unpacking the paradoxes of hypervisibility and invisibility which afflict an artist such as Tracey who deploys own body as a site for protest, outrage, resistance and pertinent discourse.
Finally we explore Tracey’s growing interest in the connections between artistic practice, shamanism, and non-Western forms of spirituality as manifested in works such as Shooting Down Babylon.
I highly recommend Tracey’s audio walk through of her Zeitz exhibition which is available at https://zeitzmocaa.museum/exhibition/exhibitions/shooting-down-babylon/
Also highly recommended is Tracey’s address to the Global Feminisms Exhibition in New York in 2007: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX5iLPLWzPM
Articles worth consulting:
Kellie Jones, "Tracey Rose: Postapartheid Playground". Journal of Contemporary African Art. 29 Summer 2004.
Polly Savage, "Playing to the Gallery: Masks, Masquerade and Museums". African Arts 41,4 Winter 2008.
Emmanuel Balogum, "Tracey Rose: Shooting Down Babylon". Art Monthly 456 May 2022. -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Hannelie Coetzee, a Johannesburg-based ecological artist who has been working across the boundaries of art, science and activist engagement. Hannelie describes herself as a visual artist, researcher and innovator. Through her ecological art practice, she aims to grow audiences that appreciate art, contextualise the science behind the natural world, and improve environmental infrastructure development through functional artworks. She uses waste materials alongside unlikely transdisciplinary partnerships to build site specific artworks and interventions which are extensively documented on her website.https://www.hanneliecoetzee.com/
Hannelie has also just completed an MSc at Wits. We are familiar with artists who undertake MAFAs or MFAs in collaboration with scientists or science labs; but Hannelie was accepted to do an MSc in the Faculty of Science despite the fact that she had no undergraduate science training. The subject of her research was Art as Transformative Praxis interrogating transient ecologic patterns. This is an important breakthrough which we will explore in this podcast together with Hannelie’s work as a visual artist and, very importantly, as an innovator. We also discuss her collaborative engagements with scientists on a variety of projects including her large-scale "veld burns" and her engagements with urban greening and indigenous healers.
This podcast was recorded remotely with Hannelie in Denmark and myself in Johannesburg. We had some technical problems with the recording; but I think the subject matter is so fascinating that I ask you to bear with the occasional variations in sound quality. -
In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Dr Portia Malatjie and Nontobeko Ntombela, the curators of When Rain Clouds Gather, an important new exhibition at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town. The exhibition is a reflection on the influential and often unacknowledged contribution of Black Women to South African art history in the 20th Century. Covering the the period from 1940 to the year 2000, the exhibition stages a cross generational communion of 40 Black women artists from early Modernism to the contemporary period.
Portia is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts, University of Cape Town. She is also adjunct curator of Africa and African diaspora at the Hyundai Tate Research Centre at the Tate Modern in London, and is adjunct curator at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town. Nontobeko is a lecturer and Head of the History of Art department in the Wits School of Arts at Wits. Previously she was curator of the Contemporary collection at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and before that was curator at the Durban Institute of Technology Art Gallery.
In this discussion, we explore the curatorial tools and strategies that Portia and Nontobeka deployed in this ambitious undertaking to disrupt existing categories of classification while creating a space to contest the erasure of work by Black women artists in South African art history. We examine the way in which they negotiated the negative effects of both invisibility and hyper-visibility on the understanding of Black women's art and the way in which Black feminism informed their curatorial approach. We also discuss the challenge of understanding curation as a form of creative practice in itself, and its importance as means of making previously suppressed work visible to new audiences.
See:
https://www.norvalfoundation.org/when-rain-clouds-gather/
https://contemporaryand.com/fr/magazines/archives-of-womanhood-and-blackness-in-south-africa/ -
In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Avril Joffe, currently the postgraduate programme coordinator and previously the Head of the Department of Cultural Policy and Management in the Wits School of Arts.
Under Avril’s headship the department was renamed to focus on cultural policy and management, and has developed a range of productive relationships with institutions in both the Global north and south, including Kings College, London; the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries at Peking University, China; and in South Africa with Business Arts South Africa, the National Arts Council, and the Goethe Institute.
We explore Avril’s own trajectory from an MPhil in Developmental Economics at Sussex University to a career as a researcher in labour relations and urban development before moving into the field of cultural policy. In this field Avril is an internationally recognised expert, advising on policy to the South African government and an appointment as an expert member of UNESCO’s Cultural Policy and Governance Facility. We look closely at Avril’s interest in Creative Methodologies as a tool for researchers collecting data, and the ground-breaking international conference on creative methodologies and urban research that Avril co-organised in 2021. We also discuss the function of cultural policy, and whether or not government policy in post-apartheid South Africa has fostered or hindered the creative arts. We weigh up the challenges of working with cultural institutions in authoritarian states such as China, and finally we discuss the ways in which creative artists can productively engage with questions of cultural policy.
Check out the following links:
Dept of Cultural Policy and Management webpage: https://www.wits.ac.za/wsoa/cultural-policy-and-management/
Dr Nancy Duxbury's website with key papers on creative methodologies: https://ces.uc.pt/en/ces/pessoas/investigadoras-es/nancy-duxbury/apresentacao -
In this dialogue, Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Dr George Mahashe, a lecturer in Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town, who was recently based at the Geneva Observatory as part of the Swiss Artists-in-Labs programme. George talks about his work at the Observatory and his perspective on the experience as a black African who has a acute awareness of his “distributed sensibilities” as a member of a specific African sociality, the Balobedu, and as an academic and an artist.
George was born and raised in Bolobedu in the rural north eastern part of Limpopo Province in South Africa. He first practiced photography as an assistant to a local itinerant photographer before going on to study for a BTech degree in photography. After working as a lecturer and practitioner in commercial photography his awareness of the implications of photography as a colonial representational practice led him into studying the intersections between anthropology, photography and fine arts practice culminating in a PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town. George used the space offered by PhD research to imagine the concept of khelobedu, from his own point of view, as a member of an African community whose knowledge practices have been studied and marginalised by the colonial academy. Using a combination of unorthodox methods, notably travel and the practice of "ill-discipline", within more established methods such as fine arts play and the participant observation techniques of anthropology, his PhD research challenges the western representational emphasis in photography while employing the film essay and developments of the camera obscure to recognise the dream as a Balodedu technology that can foreground Balobedu subjectivity.
Useful links:
The text of George's UCT PhD, MaBareBare, a rumour of a dream:
http://hdl.handle.net/11427/30544
AiL mini-documentary on George at Geneva Observatory: https://vimeo.com/56660581
Omenka interview:
https://www.omenkaonline.com/ -
In this dialogue Prof Christo Doherty of ARA speaks to Marcus Neustetter, the South African artist, cultural activist, and producer who has been working at the intersection of art, science, technology and public engagement for the last two decades since his graduation with an MAFA from Wits in 2001.
They discuss some of the collaborative projects that Marcus has undertaken across these intersections and will unpack key aspects of his critical and playful multi-disciplinary practice that has ranged from conventional drawing and painting to site-specific installations, mobile and virtual interventions, performance art, and socially engaged projects across South Africa and Africa, and internationally.
They focus on Marcus's work with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) in Sutherland in the Karoo; his explorations with light and how he has deployed the concept of the "vertical gaze" in his imaginative involvement with Sumbandila, the first South African space satellite. They also probe deeply into how his understanding of the interrelationship between artistic practice, public engagement and science has evolved, and his most recent participation in the Vienna-based transdisciplinary project, The Zone.
Links: See Marcus's artist's website: https://marcusneustetter.com/
The Zone project website: https://the-zone.at/ - Show more
