Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/682

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 22

Africa-Lite: cultural appropriation and commodification of historic blackness in post-apartheid fabric and décor design
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Conradie, Annemi; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Over the past few years, cultural appropriation has gained a degree of notoriety as a buzzword, after emerging into the wider public arena from academic, legal and political discourses. Internationally and in South Africa, debates arise predominantly around cases where historically asymmetric power relations are symbolically or materially re-enacted when dominant groups appropriate from economic or political minorities. This study examines the appropriation of colonial images of black individuals and bodies for commodification in twenty-first century South African décor and fabric design. A prominent trend in post-apartheid visual design, the re-purposing and commodification of archival photographs, and its circulation within local and global image economies and design markets demand further research and comprehensive theorising. I investigate the various aesthetic and discursive devices through which images of black bodies from South Africa’s pre-democratic past - including images of suffering, trauma and revolution - are assimilated for consumption and display within retail, leisure and domestic spheres. I use the notion of ‘subject appropriation’ to account for this form of appropriation, and to investigate the affiliation that indigenous groups claim with archival images in cases of objections to cultural appropriation, as well as where such groups deploy archival images for their own self-fashioning. In proposing a critical humanist and black existentialist approach to cultural appropriation, I suggest rethinking colonial representations as sites central to postcolonial ‘communities of practice’ in ongoing struggle for recognition, restitution and liberation.
The biopolitics of Gugulective against neoliberal capitalism
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Lemu, Massa; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In critical and museological practices, a focus on diaspora has not only limited the scope of African art but also neglected a whole discursive field and practical corpus that challenges neoliberal globalisation on the continent. While highly critical, most gallery-bound practices from Africa tend to get privatised and absorbed in inaccessible enclaves of the global art world. However, this study demonstrates that the art of Gugulective has potential to escape privatisation. Within the South African context, Gugulective’s socially engaged collaborative aesthetics contests neoliberal privatisation and co-optation through subject-centred immaterial production. In Gugulective’s biopolitical production, artists and non-artists collaborate in transformative aesthetic projects that contest neoliberal capitalism in South Africa. My term “biopolitical collectivism” describes this collective life-forming artistic practice whose products are immaterial rather than material gallery-bound objects. In a context of neoliberal capitalism, which intensifies inequality, pauperisation, and precarisation of life for profit, Gugulective, among other contemporary African art groups, seeks to transform dehumanised subjectivities through collaborative art production, subjective interchange, and sharing. By decentring the object in subject-oriented art, Gugulective’s biopolitical collectivism confronts biocapitalism on the terrain of life itself. This is particularly evident in projects such as Indaba Ludabi, Akuchanywa Apha, Titled/Untitled, and Siphi? in which Gugulective confronts issues of place, space, and race by deploying a cross-disciplinary and interstitial aesthetic practice which situates itself between the art institution and the non-art world, between aesthetics and activism, the township and the city, the shebeen and the gallery, affects and the art object, art, and life.
Crafting anti-stereotypes : creating space for critical engagement through art
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Moahi, Donlisha; Costandius, Elmarie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Art and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Xenophobia and Afrophobia attacks in South Africa and the corresponding reactions of African countries to these discriminatory and stereotypical perceptions of foreigners remain in the news. This study provides a timely contribution to the discourse on these phobias by highlighting the impact of discrimination in the school environment. The Botswana Government, as many other African governments, values multiculturalism in schools and officially supports an educational system that encourages a tolerance for diversity among people. However, the results from this study point towards learners’ and teachers’ intolerance for diversity and the other. Within this context, the aim of this study was to explore visual arts in a school in Botswana’s South East Region as a tool for learners to negotiate social and cultural meanings and to inform understandings of the self. Accordingly, the main research question was to explore the extent to which art processes can facilitate safe spaces for learners to openly engage in dialogue about stereotypes and discrimination. A qualitative approach to research was used for this study and a case study design was conducted through a process of using various methods of data collection that obtained a holistic and meaningful understanding of 75 learners’ real-life circumstances. Interpretive analysis was used to gain insight into the nature of the impact of social, political and historical contexts at school on the ways in which learners navigate their spaces of learning in a world of difference. The data revealed that learners were exposed to various forms of discrimination, or were themselves discriminating against others. These behaviour types manifested mainly as acts of bullying, which were mostly aimed at stereotypical views of tribal features that included both physical features such as skin colour and cultural features such as language. In this regard, tribal discrimination is similar to racial discrimination and reflects the ingrained mindsets left behind by colonialism. Discrimination furthermore occurred in terms of social class and income as well as sexual orientation. Accordingly, stereotyping was outlined as a technique used to discriminate against the other. Through carefully chosen art projects that encouraged reflection and collaboration, the art classroom accommodated victimised learners and the art processes facilitated engagement to express visually and/or verbally what has been unsaid or hidden. Art practices enabled a safe space for marginalised voices by creating a meeting place for two opposing processes: between rigid judgements associated with stereotypes on the one hand and ongoing, non-judging engagement on the other hand. The anticolonial and postcolonial perspectives that were introduced helped all learners to uncover social and institutional injustices. To this end, social justice education with specific reference to the role that art pedagogies can play is shown as a necessary stepping stone towards multicultural education and towards change that will dismantle the discriminatory hierarchical structures in schools in order to enable more equal opportunities for all learners.
Creolised objects: A study of material culture as marker of coloured identity
(2023-03 ) Huigen-Conradie, Stephane Edith; Costandius, Elmarie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In South Africa, coloured identities have been viewed from essentialist and instrumentalist perspectives. As a ‘group’, people racially categorised as coloured, hold a multiplicity of identities that share histories of enslavement, forced removals and various degrees of enforced reification. In this study, I propose that theoretically and practically, cultural creolisation provides a useful alternative from which to explore the complexities that exist within the life histories of people categorised as coloured. Instead of primarily focusing on peoples’ life histories, this study also considers the material dimensions of coloured identities. The exploration makes a case for creolisation being a flexible conceptual tool that is directly comparable to processes of bricolage - the experimentation with various material and cultural elements, to form assemblages. This is a practice I utilise in my artistic practice where I make use of found materials, that reflect the visual cultures I grew up with in Namibia and South Africa, to form sculptural assemblages. From this (semi)autoethnographic perspective, I position the material nature of the investigated objects as having embedded biographies and agency. I have focused on two fieldwork sites: Rehoboth in Namibia and Stellenbosch, with a focus on Cloetesville and Idas Valley, in South Africa. Both sites have a personal bearing on how I have made sense of my imposed coloured racial signifier. I look at both sites as places that have experienced some form of dislocation and how the people living in these locations have been categorised as coloured at various points in their histories. In particular, I investigated object-centred biographies present in select homes of residents in Rehoboth, Cloetesville and Idas Valley to identify how objects can symbolise identity formation and memory in unstable places. I focused on eight residents’ life stories and home possessions to determine the similarities and differences in their biographies and the material culture represented in their living rooms. The data were compared to determine how residents’ biographies and subsequently their material belongings related to contemporary theories about creolisation and coloured identity formation in a Southern African context. From this qualitative enquiry, I found that residents’ homes were a central object to their sense of belonging, with the sub-themes such as home/land, home ownerships (placement and displacement) and home extensions being identified as key concerns. I found that display cabinets became visual storytelling mechanisms from which residents could arrange and display the intimate and public biographical details of their lives and how this pertains to a larger construction of coloured identities in each localised area. Display cabinets were also identified as symbols of respectability and resistance. From a micro perspective, biographical objects, with the subthemes genealogies, status objects and nostalgic objects, were identified as individualising residents’ life stories and consequently their construction of self. Using a narrative approach assisted in unlocking details concerning the display objects found in these cabinets and an understanding of how display cabinets contributed to a particular material visualisation and visual pattern of each group and individual’s identity formation.
Decentering the archive: visual fabrications of sonic memories
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-12) Deane, Nicola Frances; Muller, Stephanus; Froneman, Willemien; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Decentering the Archive: Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories navigates various strategies of inverting and subverting the ordered, categorised and confined cultural archive, in this case, the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at the University of Stellenbosch. This practice-based doctoral study treats DOMUS as the site for a creative production of decentered reading and writing from archival fragments, while interrogating the role and power of the archive in manipulating time and collective memories by asking the question: How should fragmented or destabilising experiences be remembered given the delinking option from both modernity and post-modernity? My referral to Decolonial theory at the start of this study prompted me to test new possibilities through the “decolonial options” that Walter Mignolo describes as operating “from the margins and beyond the margins of the modern/colonial order. It posits alternatives in relation to the control of the economy (market value), the control of the state (politics of heritage based on economic wealth), and the control of knowledge” (Mignolo & Vázquez, 2013). Since my heritage lies on the side of the coloniser while I grew up within the context of a colonised nation, my position as a South African citizen is divided and complex, hence my attraction to the margins. As an artist who cuts up and rearranges image, text, and sound, my study of an archive can never be strictly scholarly, as in, disciplined and inhibited. Hence, I determined a decolonial option of working with the archive: to re-invest it with an ability to bleed - to traverse the rigid taxonomies and artificial fictional separations between categories that are generally foundational to the archival process of storing (and building on) records of social, cultural and political practices. Sound in the archive, however, carries traces of pulse in rhythm, breath and voice – traces of blood beating – and brings to awareness the vibrations of one's own tympanic membrane. It is the fabric of sound, the pulse of a particular history through sound that stimulates the composition of memories. “Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things” (Edmond Jabès, 1984). The work which is embedded in herri is divided into four passages, these are Surfaces, Invagination, Noise and The Mask. These passages are further infused by my conceptual framing through the terms “dehiscence” and “pentimento”, borrowed from the fields of medicine and painting, indicating the leap across mediums, disciplines and territories of knowledge, towards a mutidimensional understanding of time and space through and beyond the senses.
The edible museum : exploring foodways as sociomuseological practice in Kayamandi, South Africa
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Vogts, Elsa; Costandius, Elmarie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Food is one of the most fundamental aspects related to human well-being. The ways in which food moves through community social systems, through foodways, are implicated in complex networks of privilege and marginalisation, and are marked by sensory encounters. Sociomuseology places the well-being of communities, and by implication cross-cultural tolerance and understanding, at the forefront of its approach to meaning making. Sociomuseology could be a transformative museological practice through which to explore sensory encounters as experienced through foodways, as it seeks to make meaning of the complexity of these encounters towards community well-being. Such a practice could be especially relevant in the context of South Africa, where tensions between cultural cohesion and xenophobic violence have contributed to disenchantment with the democratic project of the “Rainbow Nation”. To this end, the purpose of this research undertaking was to examine and document the foodways of the Kayamandi township, within its specific context as a marginalised community in post-apartheid South Africa, through a sociomuseological practice entitled the “Edible Museum”. Sensory theory, posthumanism and sociomuseology formed the theoretical framework through which the study was conducted. I followed an interpretive approach, informed by sensory ethnography and a diffractive methodology, in implementing an action research design, which consisted of group and individual interviews with participants based in Kayamandi. The study found that foodways are implicated in a direct way in the tension between the ambition of cultural cohesion and misunderstanding of others as it emerges in the context of Kayamandi and broader Stellenbosch. The ability of food to speak through a sensory and embodied language was observed to highlight the ways in which people interacted with each other, especially across cultural boundaries. Moreover, the ability of food to engage with disruption, through the senses, and the way in which this disruption could be positively mediated through sociomuseological interactions, was found to be key. It is through sensory disruptions that are enacted towards bodily transformations that foodways can be enlisted towards the facilitation of potential crosscultural exchange through a museological mediation, which speaks in an embodied language. The proposition of the Edible Museum thus functions as a sociomuseological approach that could be followed towards the facilitation of cross-cultural tolerance and understanding through making sensory meaning of foodways. The Edible Museum is also a process that can critique and transform the museological practices of those museums that struggle to remain relevant in a post-apartheid, and I would argue, posthuman, context where the necessity for cross-cultural tolerance and understanding through alternative modalities and knowledge systems is revealed. This study has therefore contributed to the expansion of dialogue concerning cross-cultural interaction and tolerance in the museological and food studies fields, through the novel perspective of a sensory approach to foodways.
An elusive archive : three trans men and photographic recollection
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Van der Wal, Ruurd Willem Ernst; Viljoen, Stella; Viljoen, Shaun; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The archive as mnemonic device and taxonomic structure plays a significant role in the visualisation of identity. This thesis draws on the example of the personal photographic archives of three trans men to suggest ways of understanding archives as discursive and visual practices through which fluctuating narratives of self can be uncovered, traced, erased, renegotiated and fictionalised. This thesis considers how these participants negotiate the roles of author, archivist and photographer in the creation of their personal photographic archives, and how such archives intersect with discourses on the social, somatic and political.
An exploration of the potential of wordless picturebooks to encourage parent-child reading in the South African context
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Le Roux, Adrie; Costandius, Elmarie; Oostendorp, Marcelyn; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This research study focused on the influence of a participatory project in which wordless picturebooks were used in parent-child joint reading and, more generally, the development of a culture of reading in the home. The research was conducted within the South African context, in low socio-economic areas of Gauteng, and is approached from the researcher’s viewpoint as an illustrator. Using multimodal social semiotics as a theoretical departure, the researcher argues that the characteristics of wordless picturebooks can serve as motivating factors that could contribute to developing a more positive attitude to reading in South Africa. Internationally, there is a large volume of literature which advocates the use of wordless books in literacy development, yet little research exists on their use in the South African context. Furthermore, the majority of research investigating the value of book sharing has been conducted in the developed world. South Africa has a very low general reading rate, and despite a growing support for literacy development in mother tongue, there still exists a lack of indigenous language picturebooks for very young children. Many families are also simply unable to afford books. As a result, many children are not exposed to books or book sharing activities prior to entering formal school, where the focus of reading is not on reading for enjoyment. By systematically moving the reading environment from a community center or pre-school to participant homes, the main aim of this research was to determine the perceptions of the parents /primary caregivers and children that participated in the research regarding the value of utilizing wordless picturebooks. The researcher aimed go gain an understanding of how wordless picturebooks could assist in ensuring that literacy poor families are supported as a child’s first educator. The research was based on participative action research, and was conducted in three literacy poor areas of Gauteng. Qualitative data was collected by means of focus group and semi-structured individual interviews before and after participants attended a reading programme that spanned over a four to six-week period. Prior to the reading programme, a story collection workshop was hosted at two of the research sites, and the stories collected from the participants was used by the researcher to create wordless picturebooks. The use of these books were subsequently pilot tested at the third research site, whereas existing wordless picture books were used at the first two sites. An initial sample of 42 parents/primary caregivers and their pre-school child were included in the study, however low participant retention resulted in a significantly smaller sample that completed the research with only 14 parents/primary caregivers having attended all the sessions of the reading programme. It should however be noted that even though the number of participants that completed the entire programme, in other words, who attended all sessions, was low, data pertaining to the reading experience after the implementation of the programme was collected from 39 participants in total. Thematic analysis of the data was conducted, and themes that pertained to aspects of Design (as a central notion in Multiliteracies), Multimodality and participant generated content were identified. The key findings indicated that wordless picturebooks can be viewed as a valuable tool in fostering a culture of reading in the South African context. Participants reported that they were reading more at home, and that the activity was enjoyable, compared to previous reading experiences. Furthermore, the research findings highlighted factors that influence parent-child reading programmes within the context of South African, literacy poor areas. It is recommended the genre warrants more local attention and that larger-scale research studies be conducted with more diverse populations.
Exploring critical citizenship and decolonisation as a framework for design education in South Africa
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-03) Botes, Herman; Costandius, Elmarie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In 2020 the globe is in turmoil. When this study commenced in 2018 the call to action for the citizen designer was premised on the #Feesmustfall campaign and the #Rhodesmustfall student protests, the July 2021 social unrest in South Africa that resulted in unprecedented violence and looting, rampant corruption in public and private sectors in South Africa and growing nationalism seen from BREXIT and the Trump administration in the USA. The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic brought even more attention to the role of the citizenry and how citizens can be capacitated to navigate uncertain and difficult times. Within the field of design, the concept of citizen designer is established. It was considered that the notion of educating a ‘citizen designer’ could be further developed in the South African design education context. The study therefore focused on how critical citizenship and decolonisation perspectives can contribute to a design pedagogy framework for citizen designer education in the context of South African universities of technology. Theoretical perspectives from critical citizenship and decolonisation provided the theoretical base for the study. A qualitative research approach was taken that involved case study research methodology. The data in the study was collected from a survey of and interviews with South African design educators as well as interviews with South African design students. From the data, South African citizen designer can be decribed as designers that have a deep understanding of self, ethics and critical thinking; they operate in transdisciplinary settings with a focus on the tangible betterment of sustainable quality of all life through a caring conscience. The study determined that the themes in critical citizenship and decolonisation perspectives that can contribute to design pedagogy for educating a South African citizen designer can be broadly categorised into concepts related to context, African focus, personal development and curriculum development. The category of context determines the relevance and approach to be taken when engaging with the African focus, personal development, and curriculum development categories. The study concludes with a list of suggested themes in these categories that could be considered for implementation by design educators in their specific field working towards the development of a South African citizen designer.
Investigating the semiotic landscape of the house museum in Stellenbosch, South Africa
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) De Villiers, Gera; Costandius, Elmarie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa as a nation achieved democracy in 1994; however, the country’s institutions of knowledge and power are still grappling with the ways that they can and must facilitate transformation. The White Paper on Arts, Culture, and Heritage of 1996 and its subsequent revised draft in 2017 challenge organisations involved in arts and culture – such as museums – to democratise and decolonise to become inclusive sources of the country’s varied history and culture. Museums attract a diverse range of the public and, therefore, have the ability to foster change through the narratives of the tangible and intangible history and culture that they provide. This study focused on the town of Stellenbosch, where there is a significant lack of inclusive museological institutions that share the histories and cultures of all its communities (it is made up of ten adjoining small towns and townships, of which the Kayamandi township is one). Stellenbosch has a complex history with colonialism and apartheid and this is the history that is predominantly associated with the town. Therefore, there is a need to redefine the discourses of difference and division between the town’s various sociocultural groups. Social semiotics and the dual theory of museology and curatorship formed the theoretical framework for this study. I followed a qualitative approach within an interpretive paradigm and a comparative case study research design was used. The research questioned what a comparative analysis of the semiotic landscapes of the Stellenbosch Village Museum and the Kayamandi Creative District House Museum reveal about the broader historical and sociocultural contexts wherein each exist, with the aim to ascertain the extent to which the museums are appropriate house museum models in a post-apartheid context. The data in this study were collected mostly through individual interviews with management, staff, docents, and homeowner docents of the Stellenbosch Village Museum and the Kayamandi Creative District House Museum. Additional data were collected through individual interviews, workshops, observations, field visits, e-mail interview and correspondence, and document analysis. The investigation revealed that the use of traditional museological practices, as mostly embodied by the Stellenbosch Village Museum, adds to the various deficiencies in inclusivity regarding the history and culture of Stellenbosch. Conversely, the use of new museological practices, as mostly embodied by the Kayamandi Creative District House Museum, could address this lack, as the black, Xhosa history and culture it represents offers a balance to the white, colonial history of the town. The study found that for democratisation and decolonisation to occur, it is necessary that Stellenbosch’s museums embrace new, innovative museological practices that cater to local knowledge and previously marginalised communities. The study offers the Kayamandi Creative District House Museum as a potential new museological model that could assist in reducing differences and divisions in Stellenbosch’s sociocultural divide through the cross-cultural exchange of history and culture by and in the very community that the museum represents. This study aimed to contribute to the research field of museology and curatorship in a postcolonial and post-apartheid Stellenbosch context with the expansion of the dialogue on museological transformation through democratisation and decolonisation.
The mark of a silent language : the way the body-mind draws
(Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2011-03) Gunter, Elizabeth; Van Robbroeck, Lize; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The thesis deals with the notion that individuation in drawing provides visible evidence of experiential cognition as embodied action. It asserts that trait as enaction signifies constructive and inventive processes that involve the body-mind. Trait emerges as nonrepresentationist, non-expressive component of drawing that marks the pre-conceptual as conceptual. Therefore, drawing functions as a complex interface between drafter and world that unifies antimonies such as inside and outside; convention and invention; remoteness and intimacy; body and mind; and subject and object. The thesis outlines drawing as a self-reflexive research process that constructs and invents. An understanding of trait as invention, the thesis proposes, can aid the drawing facilitator at higher education level to develop individual student drafters’ creativity. The thesis therefore argues for a form of drawing facilitation that is responsive to the complex interaction between the self and the world. Responsive mediation develops and celebrates diversity in socio-cultural heritage, personal history, and individual differences.
Re-imagining learning and teaching art: exploring embodied mark-making with foundation phase student teachers at Cape Peninsula University of Technology
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03 ) Meiring, Jacoba Johanna; Costandius, Elmarie; Perold-Bull, Karolien; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Art.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Prescriptive methodologies have become normative in everyday classroom learning and teaching and lead to the need for certain outcomes in Visual Art education that favour teaching how to produce end products over exploration and experimental on with process work. Low levels of exposure to Visual Art by generalist student teachers in the B.Ed. foundation phase (FP) programmes during their own schooling, and the dense Life Skills curriculum in the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) in South Africa, of which the Creative Arts form part, pose challenges for teacher education programmes, and for practising teachers. The central aim of this research was to address these challenges by implementing embodied arts-based experiences for student teachers, thus facilitating a diﬀerent approach to learning and teaching Visual Art in the FP and contributing to a more socially just education environment. The Covid-19 pandemic necessitated moving the ﬁve practical arts-based interventions that were central to this research online. This transition had limitatations, but brought valuable insights into addressing disembodied learning and teaching practices in a virtual classroom setting. The study utilised arts-based research (ABR) to explore alternative approaches to learning and teaching. It challenged traditional human-centred and knowledge-based research methodologies, emphasising the interplay of ethics, ontology and knowledge, and engaging the researcher as integral to the ethical, ontological and epistemological processes of the research. This implied that I had to embrace the uncertainties posed by the pandemic and embody the practical changes I wanted to address through this research. Through mark-making, anarchiving and diﬀraction, this research disrupted the conventional focus on representative art education embracing interdisciplinary concepts, thus highlighting the interconnections among decolonial, posthuman and new material ideas whilst fostering opportunities for embodied sensory exploration. The ﬁndings show that embodied processes and relational techniques like mark-making promote contextualised, subjective learning, addressing the lack of body knowledge in arts-based practice. Capitalising on learners’ and teachers’ subjectvities and inherent creativity through open-ended arts-based processes focused on embodied atunement provided relational awareness and meaningful, embodied connections to new knowledge, addressing the current focus on disembodied learning and teaching. Shifting the focus from the assessment of content, skills or aesthetics in artmaking to developing methodologies for including sensory intelligence as a skill in terms of how student teachers relate to content in full body-mind awareness is a way to address normative prescriptive and disembodied methodologies. It includes cultivating the skills of reading, tracing and acting on embodied knowledge through arts-based processes. Over time, teacher commitment to gradually enable learners/students and themselves to develop embodied and relational atunement could assist in a beter understanding of how the body-mind entangles with human and nonhuman others in learning and teaching new content. The material-force conceptual framework developed from these insights oﬀers arts-based praxis a way to work aﬃrmatively in such atunement to the content-methodology and product-process divide, whilst including learner/student voices in learning and teaching. The philosophies of embodiment, relationality and process ontology should underlie all learning and teaching. Ways to apply the framework across disciplines and integrated with arts-based practice warrant further research.
Reconfiguring motherhood: maternal temporality in the work of four South African visual artists
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Steyn, Christine; Van Robbroeck, Lize ; Viljoen, Stella; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this study, I examine the visual reframing of mothering by four South African women artists whose projects conceptualise maternal subjectivity through the bodily and psychological experiences of pregnancy, birth and mothering. The principle thesis of my research is that the selected artists’ engagement with maternal subjectivity can be addressed through an exploration of the maternal body’s ability to disrupt conventional experiences of time. Presenting an alternative discourse of maternal embodiment, the artworks offer ways to consider how rethinking maternity might reformulate our experience and thinking about lived time as that which is dynamic, relational and, at times, conflicting, revealing the intrinsic intra-activity of being.
Salt-water-bodies : from an atlas of loss
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Van Eeden-Wharton, Adrienne; Gunter, Elizabeth; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Salt-Water-Bodies: From an Atlas of Loss is a response, through photomedia(tions) and live art, to material-affective encounters with/in littoral death zones along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean of the South African West Coast and seven adjacent islands – sites haunted by violent legacies and unchecked exploitation, where heightened precarity marks the lives of earth others. Shadow places, where the histories of indiscriminate, increasingly systematic killing and destruction – the ‘harvesting’ of whales, seals, seabirds and guano – are intertwined with narratives of settler-colonialism, empire, state control, racial segregation, land dispossession, coercive labour practices, militarisation, and industrialisation. Presently, these sites fall within Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) or otherwise restricted-access zones. This inquiry has been shaped, in many and in important ways, by walking the shore – a liminal space of movement and instability, alternately claimed by land and sea; an often-troubled site of shifting boundaries and transition, uncertainty and possibility, fear and transgression, conflict, myth, death and desire. Islands, even more so, are ambivalent spaces of refuge, exile and quarantine; shipwreck and marooning; indentured labour and military occupation; allegory and escapist fantasy. Salt-Water-Bodies is an in/complete, im/possible atlas – neither comprehensive encyclopaedia, nor reliable map. This inherently unfinished work, a postmortem mourning and wit(h)nessing, is characterised by the friction of at the same time following after and along, losing and finding, straying and circling back; of slow praxis in times of urgency and acceleration, and of grappling with the yearning towards more wakefull and just multispecies futures, but not-knowing how to tell stories that are just big enough.
Seeing ghosts : the past in contemporary images of Afrikaner self-representation
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-12) Sonnekus, Theo; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Contemporary Afrikaner ethnic identity is subject to attempts at rehabilitation, which seek to fit Afrikaner whiteness to the post-apartheid milieu. This thesis investigates how popular visual culture, aimed particularly at the white Afrikaner consumer, provides transformative identity-positions by ingeniously re-imagining Afrikanerness. The potential of such images for identity- and memory-work is explored in relation to the various conditions (political, historical, economic or otherwise) that determine their social and psychological significance. The thesis particularly accounts for the manner in which the past is refigured (with varying degrees of criticality and self-reflexivity) in these consumer items and advertisements, and explores their deployment of discursive devices such as irony, hybridisation, nostalgia, and collective memory.
Setting art apart : inside and outside the South African National Gallery (1895-2016)
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Lilla, Qanita; Gunter, Elizabeth; Meyer, Andrea; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTARCT: Setting Art Apart explores practices of exclusion and erasure in the white art world in South Africa. It looks at how art and art spaces, such as the art museum and the art academy were part of a project of reinforcing difference. The South African National Gallery in Cape Town is the historical reference of the study. The time frame spans the colonial beginnings of the museum through apartheid to the democratic present. After a long period of bureaucratic uncertainty the South African National Gallery was opened in 1930 as a monument to white art and culture. Excluding those who did not belong was part of the process of white self-affirmation. State art museums served to make black people invisible by portraying them as marginal while denying their art. Furthermore, the art museum played a role in the way powerful white constituencies imagined themselves. There are two prevailing elements that I have found useful to examine in the project: the manipulation of space and the changing position of the excluded black individual. Space is what was imagined, defined and controlled by the South African National Gallery. The museum shaped itself into a field of contention during the colonial period, physically setting art apart in the racially heterogeneous city of Cape Town. The museum differentiated itself from private spaces during apartheid by aligning itself with the sanitization and reconfiguration of the city. The black individual had a fraught and traumatic relationship with the white art world. At once omnipresent and invisible, black people did the manual labor and kept the museum space pristine but their presence was scarcely recognized. In this thesis I consider numerous instances of the erasure of black subjectivity including the way black female models were studied as generic black bodies in drawing classes at Rhodes University and were barely considered human. After apartheid, at the South African National Gallery, were objectified while the legacy of apartheid endured. In order to investigate practices inside the museum, I use traditional methods of archival research and look at exhibition catalogues, annual reports, newspaper reports and associated publications to track what was included. However, looking at what was erased and excluded exceeds the bounds of traditional methodologies, especially since archives were formed through colonial and apartheid enterprise. In order to engage with the apartheid archive while seeking to examine what is on the outside I position myself in the argument. As researcher, as a woman of colour and as a subject excluded from the white art world I insert my personal voice and experience in order to open up a space closed off to people of colour. Setting Art Apart is a project about a public institution that was never truly public and by inserting my own voice I engage subjectively with marginalization and exclusion.
Telling places, a photographic exploration
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-12) De Klerk, Anneke; Viljoen, Estelle; Van der Wal, Ernst; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis and accompanying exhibition explore landscape photography practice within the politically fraught context of the Southern African landscape and equally fraught traditions of landscape representation, especially in previously colonised countries. Ideological and political readings of landscape photographs tend to automatically position the artist and, by extension, the viewer, in a distanced, contemplative relation to the landscape (Malpas, 2011a: 6). This kind of relation skews power relations towards the viewer; in part due to the nature of the photographic medium with its monocular, static, linear perspective. This thesis seeks to question this determinist position and to explore through reflective photographic practice an alternative frame within which to engage with places photographically. With this study I propose that a postphenomenological approach to making and thinking about landscape photography can bring about a co-constitutive relation between photographer, camera, and environment through which places continue to become. Landscape photography as representation of place is conceptualised as consisting of two stages: firstly, the act of photographing in the physical environment (Being-in) and secondly, the process of preparing and presenting the works (Telling-of). For the first phase, Being-in, I created three photographic events that allowed me, as a practising photographer, to engage with the complexity of place in terms of Casey’s (2001: 417) definition, which draws socio-political histories, personal histories, and the physical environment together into individual embodied experience. In the cyclic process of engaging in the practice of photographing place and reflecting on this practice in relation to phenomenological understanding of being, as well as postphenomenological developments that entangle technologies in this being, I tested the practice against the theory and the theory against the practice, as recommended for a phenomenology of practice by Max Van Manen (2014: 66-68). For each of the three places – Morgenster, Mochudi, and Kempton Park in Southern Africa – selected for their role in different times in my personal history, I chose a different photographic system with which to work that resonated with my individual experience of that place and facilitated distinctive expressions of the experience. I then produced three bodies of photographic works. Phase 2 is titled Telling-of. This section deals with the process of bringing the work produced in Phase 1 into the public discourse on land in South Africa as well as on South African landscape photography. In this telling-of, physical places are represented as ‘landscape’, with all its ideological and art historical ‘baggage’. To contextualise the work created for this thesis, I consider this ‘baggage’ and relate it to the ideas and understandings developed in Phase 1, as well as a brief history of landscape photography in South Africa. UNSETTLED: One Hundred Year Xhosa War of Resistance (1776-1876) by Nunn is discussed as emblematic of South African photographers’ engagement with land from a highly political, personally involved stance, but also as a form of practice-based research. Curatorial practice is then explored as a form of telling-byshowing in the work of Nunn, as well as the curation of my exhibition that forms part of this research: Telling Places: A Photographic Exploration. I explore how the curatorial process becomes a phenomenological act of shaping relations between display technologies and viewers that tells of, and is telling, of places, and thereby ‘emplaces’ the viewer.
Thinking about, with and through design : a cartography for transformation
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-12) Karolien, Perold-Bull; Costandius, Elmarie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Transformation in South African higher education has recently been a topic of major debate. Student protests have given rise to increased awareness of the inherent complexities involved in actively working towards a transformed, just and productive citizenry through higher education. How to actively move forward while negotiating these complexities at ground level, however, remains a challenge, specifically at Stellenbosch University. This research aimed to productively respond to this challenge. It therefore was anchored in a philosophy of immanence and relational ontology. From this perspective, it is impossible to separate the ontological, epistemological and methodological aspects of research from one another. Research has to be approached onto-epistemologically. This implied that I took on the challenge of practising the change I wanted to address through my teaching and learning within the institution, rather than studying it from the outside. I actively tried to flatten the boundaries between the dominantly defined subject positions I occupied in this context, i.e. that of designer, researcher and teacher. The central aim of the research was accordingly to critically explore design education in the context of transformation at Stellenbosch University through practising design research/education geared at productive change within the institution. In doing this, a range of critical cartographies emerged. In thinking about design, design in the South African context was mapped genealogically. In thinking with design, the entangled fields of research and education were similarly explored. In thinking through design, a variety of processes of subjectification that transpired through the doing of a specific case of design/research/teaching in the context of the Visual Communication Design curriculum in the Visual Arts Department of Stellenbosch University was deliberated on through employing the methodological tool of plugging-in developed by Jackson and Mazzei. Key theoretical concepts that sprouted in thinking about and with design were used to develop analytical questions that encouraged processes of dis-identification, i.e. resistance to the easy extraction of meaning from data, throughout this process. These concepts included Deleuze’s notion of difference in itself, Braidotti’s concept of affirmative ethics, Rancière’s idea of emancipation, Barad’s notion of intra-action, and Foucault’s concept of parrhesia or critical truth-telling. Negotiating the research in thinking about, with and through design – an inherently creative and relational practice – allowed embodied experience of how effecting productive transformation in the context of Stellenbosch University necessitated active commitment to experimentation with representational praxis in ways that challenged its traditional semiotic function. Such experience contributed to subjects becoming more attuned to recognising moments of transformation within and as part of their situated present. Consequently, it could be argued that the more these moments become felt through everyday teaching and learning, the more ‘real’ transformation could become in the broader institutional context. Experimentation with onto-epistemological praxis in other situated teaching and learning contexts at Stellenbosch University is hence recommended and warrants further research.
Thinking with animals : an exploration of the animal turn through art making and metaphor
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Cruise, Wilma; Gunter, Elizabeth; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: No abstract available
Unsettling segregation: the representation of urbanisation in black artists’ work from the 1920s to the 1990s
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Sidogi, Pfunzo; Van Robbroeck, Lize; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this study I explore artistic representations of urbanisation produced by black South African artists throughout the twentieth century. Successive colonial and apartheid governments denied black people full rights to the city through, amongst other strategies, the systematic creation of black urbanisms or ‘black cities’. Commonly known as townships, ‘black cities’ were built to house reservoirs of black labour beyond the major cities and industrial hubs. This forced separation resulted in selective and ambiguous integration for the urbanised black populace. The influx of black people into the peri-urban sphere led to an unprecedented proliferation of artists recording the black experience of living and working in segregated urbanisms. Regrettably, much of the discourses on urbanisation produced by white scholars constructed black urbanisation specifically as a ‘problem’,and the diverse artistic annals showcasing urban black life were classified as ‘Township Art’, a category that could not fully capture the multi-dimensional, complex,and layered experiences of the urban black. A Social-Darwinist teleology that rural-based African traditions necessarily had to make way for urban-based western modernity informed the way black artists’ works were interpreted. Contesting these discoures,I use Afropolitanism, and the associated notions of multi-locality and New Africanism, to reframe depictions of twentieth-century urbanisation by black artists in order to redress the sweeping and essentialising binaries that characterised white writing on the phenomenon. Through a thick description of the major forces that shaped urban black life, I use the redeeming qualities of Afropolitanism to arrive at alternate interpretations of the artistic representations of black urbanisation created by black artists, which ultimately unsettle the rural-urban and tradition-modernity dichotomies.

Browse

Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts) by Title

Results Per Page

Sort Options