Image & Text最新文献

{"title":"The duration of To Be(Hold) in Revere: An Exhibition of Historical Photographs of People with Intellectual Disability","authors":"R. du Plessis","doi":"10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a7","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I discuss my curation of a photographic exhibition of people with intellectual disability (PWID) who were institutionalised at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, from 1890 to 1920. The exhibition titled, To Be(Hold) in Revere, aimed to display affirmative photographs and humanising stories of PWID obtained from the Asylum's casebooks. The Sites of Conscience movement influenced the exhibition's aim. The movement seeks to recover the agency and personhood of those who lived at a site of human suffering in order to establish a collective memory of their voices and experiences. This article details my curatorial approach; it provides a telling of the life stories of seven patients and outlines how I adopted the principles of the Sites of Conscience movement in facilitating exhibition walkabouts with the public. A key facet of the walkabouts was encouraging the public to witness the personhood of the Asylum's PWID, as well as to explore the current issues faced by today's PWID and advocate for their human rights.","PeriodicalId":288281,"journal":{"name":"Image & Text","volume":"350 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123186933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between damage and possibility: Informal Recycling Conceived as Life Raft","authors":"Jacki Mclnnes","doi":"10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a6","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary South African society is deeply inequitable, thrusting the consumerist waste of those who have the means into the sphere of those whose most basic needs for survival are not adequately met. Much of this waste is recyclable, however, and is now recognised to have substantial monetary value. The collecting and selling of the discards of the wealthy thus offers a viable source of income for the country's poor. This essay appraises Johannesburg in terms of its complex socio-economic systems and problems, particularly as these pertain to waste and its handlers. Specifically, it examines two conceptually related art interventions involving the City's informal recyclers. The first, House 38: Hazardous Objects, commenced in 2009. Various iterations followed, culminating in the second - Sleeps with the fishes in 2016. In both, the intention was to articulate questions of value - material and, more especially, human. House 38: Hazardous Objects comprised an installation of hand-beaten lead trash-objects and became a conceptual device to interrogate the following themes: the artwork as actant; labour, skill and materiality; and permanence versus disposability. Sleeps with the fishes re-purposed Theodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1819) by staging a group of recyclers crammed into a floundering skiff atop one of Johannesburg's infamous mine dumps. Just as Géricault had sought to illustrate the inherent danger of governing bodies putting their interests above those of their citizens, giving power to political favourites, and abandoning the poor, so too did I wish to caution that civil society as a whole cannot expect to escape unscathed when governmental and societal structures turn a blind eye to burgeoning consumption and its fallout - and to the circumstances of the poor who attend to the predicament. But this essay also proposes that, since a physical shipwreck can be survived, it can therefore also symbolise innovation, endurance, spiritual and ethical resilience, and rebellion against authoritarian structures. And furthermore, just as the recycler's trolleys are likened to sea-going vessels and their drivers to seafarers, so too, the pallet/raft can be suggested as a potent allegory for the self-reliant mariner who must use what little is available to survive in open waters. It will be seen that this essay persistently mediates between the diametrical themes of hardship and of opportunity, thereby articulating and sustaining the titular reference to damage and possibility.","PeriodicalId":288281,"journal":{"name":"Image & Text","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131687796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Play-able: using play to realise the intent of social design","authors":"Fatima Cassim","doi":"10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a5","url":null,"abstract":"Design - by its relational nature of connecting people, places and things - is an intrinsically social practice. However, the marked shift from prioritising commercial design objectives to creating constructive opportunities for collective engagement and social change has resulted in the emergence of social design. Viewed as a discursive moment and not a discipline, social design embraces different design approaches and participatory processes; as such, it is not defined by a pre-determined design process or outcome, but rather by its intent of engendering responsibility and social behaviour change. Within this context then, the aim of the paper is to reflect on the way in which play enables designers to realise the intent of their social design practice. To address the aim, the paper first contextualises social design and presents a conceptual framework of play. Secondly, the paper presents South African vignettes of the city and the higher-education design classroom to highlight the practical value play affords design to aid the understanding of social problems in general and advancing agency and ownership for sustained social behaviour change, in particular.","PeriodicalId":288281,"journal":{"name":"Image & Text","volume":"707 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116106464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conceptions of iconicity and their historical reorientations: Pippa Skotnes's horse skeletons and the topos of the Annunciation","authors":"Suzanne de Villiers-Human","doi":"10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a4","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":288281,"journal":{"name":"Image & Text","volume":"133 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122427129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Health, hospital(ity) and hegemony: Artistic agencies of two women weavers at Ceza, 1962","authors":"Philippa Hobbs","doi":"10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a3","url":null,"abstract":"Art history has yet to accord recognition to two women for their pivotal roles at a small tapestry-weaving project at Ceza Mission Hospital in rural South Africa in 1962. As I argue below, it was largely the agencies of Allina Ndebele from rural KwaZulu-Natal and Ulla Gowenius from Sweden that laid the groundwork for what would later evolve into a renowned tapestry centre at Rorke's Drift. Although representations depicted Ceza as idyllic, the women pursued this venture in what was a coercive environment, in which a rural black community was marginalised not merely by disease, but forms of power that included racial oppression, doctrine, patriarchy, social convention and biomedicine. This account recovers details of Ndebele and Gowenius's inventive interactions and accords subjectivity to convalescent weavers disenfranchised by modalities of social control, in turn disrupting homogenising notions of this pedagogic milieu as a duality of empowered trainers and those directed by them. Exposing the conditions in which the project was fostered, I situate the venture in a context of mid-century Swedish philanthropy, interrogating previous representations of Ceza as an outcome of benign modernity and the project as the fruits of foreign expertise.","PeriodicalId":288281,"journal":{"name":"Image & Text","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124295532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Montage in play","authors":"J. Higgins","doi":"10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a2","url":null,"abstract":"Montage is commonly identified solely with film-editing. Why this is the case when conceptually it is synonymous with the practice of collage is due largely to the Soviet insistence that Russian editing practices - montage - differed substantially from Hollywood editing practices. In asserting the specificity of a Soviet montage practice which seeks to entirely control the message of film for the spectator, Sergei Eisenstein set himself against the thinking of his rival and contemporary Dziga Vertov. In this dispute, the focus becomes the politics of reading more generally. This dispute around the politics of active reading is later echoed and amplified in Jacques Derrida's arguments around the postcard, and picked up in South Africa around the understanding of a recent montage text, 40 nights/40 days: from the lockdown. The dynamics of what it is to be a \"fearful reader\" are here taken further through the question of montage in play and the politics of reading in the moment of Covid-19.","PeriodicalId":288281,"journal":{"name":"Image & Text","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132362361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Speak to a community audience\": The Staffrider illustrations of Mzwakhe (Muziwakhe Nhlabatsi) 1979-1987","authors":"D. Pretorius","doi":"10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a1","url":null,"abstract":"The South African literary and arts magazine Staffrider (1978-1993) is known for its Black Consciousness stance and the contribution it made in the struggle against apartheid. From its inception the magazine contained illustrations, photographs, artwork and graphics alongside prose, poetry, plays, essays and reports, and for nearly a decade illustrations signed by 'Mzwakhe' appeared frequently. Mzwakhe, the pen-name of Muziwakhe Nhlabatsi, contributed a sizeable number of illustrations to accompany the writing of several notable South African authors. This article offers a discussion of his illustrative contribution to Staffrider in the period from 1979 to 1987 in the context of Black Consciousness as a counter to hegemonic apartheid discourse. I discuss Black Consciousness and the 'Black Consciousness Aesthetic' (Hill 2018) in relation to his illustrations, point out the reciprocal relationship between his educational work for the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED) and his cartoons and comics for Staffrider and describe his portraits and the influence of African masks on his work. Staffrider presented the opportunity for a counter discourse to the official apartheid narratives to be published (Manase 2005:70) and I argue that Nhlabatsi contributed to this counter discourse through his illustrations which visualised Black Consciousness in a variety of styles and techniques and the humanity, beauty and dignity with which he rendered most of his subjects.","PeriodicalId":288281,"journal":{"name":"Image & Text","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130086970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Haecceity and haptics: A critical explication of bookness in Speaking in Tongues: Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking","authors":"David Paton","doi":"10.17159/2617-3255/2022/n36a27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2022/n36a27","url":null,"abstract":"Given the ongoing need for a more rigorous theoretical underpinning for book arts discourse, this essay conjoins a critical explication of my artist's book Speaking in Tongues: Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking, and the practice of making it, with selected foundational statements on the haptic experience of artists' books by Gary Frost. These statements provide a framework across and through which I am able to weave the explication. In order to do this, however, a history of the call for a more critical underpinning of the field is first undertaken. Thereafter, selected relevant theoretical tropes that have been influential on my thinking and practice are drawn together, forming a ground upon which the explication can be undertaken, focusing particularly upon haptic theory. This explication of artist's book practice acknowledges, and is predicated upon, the well-documented lack of a conclusive definition for such objects, and thus I attempt to foreground constituent concepts of bookness as critical and appropriate lenses for characterising and theorising the book arts.","PeriodicalId":288281,"journal":{"name":"Image & Text","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123895533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Haptic modes of engagement in Willem Boshoff’s Blind Alphabet","authors":"Jenni Lauwrens","doi":"10.17159/2617-3255/2022/n36a26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2022/n36a26","url":null,"abstract":"Created for people with visual limitations, Willem Boshoff's Blind Alphabet (1990 - ongoing) has already received extensive critical attention. Surprisingly, however, this literature has overlooked how those for whom the installation was created, experience and appreciate it. This article reports on a series of interviews with people who are blind or have vision loss, and people who are sighted and were blindfolded. The participants in the study were invited to explore and then describe their experience of selected sculptures in the letter L series, which is the latest addition to Blind Alphabet. The research demonstrated that the different sculptures solicit different tactual exploration by the participants thereby revealing insights about the sculptures that are unavailable to sight. Furthermore, Blind Alphabet solicits haptic, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive interactivity from its blind and blindfolded audience. This whole-body, multisensorial engagement, in turn, activates memory, affect and the imagination. In this way, Blind Alphabet foregrounds the body as the locus of perception, thought and consciousness and demonstrates the role of the senses other than sight in shaping the experience, understanding, and meaning of artworks.","PeriodicalId":288281,"journal":{"name":"Image & Text","volume":"150 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115891251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From the physical to the digital: Encounters in the KKNK online gallery","authors":"Dineke Orton","doi":"10.17159/2617-3255/2022/n36a24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2022/n36a24","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores the processes and curatorial techniques that support corporeal engagements with online exhibitions. Exhibitions, physical and otherwise, are a complex interplay between spaces - real and imagined -audiences, and tangible or intangible objects. This is a guiding notion of this article, supported by Merleau-Ponty's perspective of the relation between internal human experiences and the external bodily encounters that shape them. I maintain that differing digital curatorial presentations can enhance or subdue the embodied interaction of visitors. By relying on my lived experience of navigating the transfer of the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival's visual arts programme of 2020 to the online sphere, I discuss various strategies deployed to encourage embodied engagement. Amongst other findings, the study underscores the need to consider audience preferences and allowing visitors a sense of agency to choose how they want to engage artwork online. Even though the arena of exchange might differ, I argue that all exhibitions, whether online or brick-and-mortar, provide audiences with the possibility of an engaging experience. In addition to the exhibition itself, viewers embody another energy - and it is the viewer's deliberate performance and choice to interact that produces the distinctive experience of an exhibition.","PeriodicalId":288281,"journal":{"name":"Image & Text","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117179131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}