An Archive of Upset : the Shift from Commissioning to Curating through South Africa’s Representations at the Bienal de São Paulo and the Interstitial Nexus of Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso
- Authors: Dantas, Nancy Isabel
- Date: 2021-04
- Subjects: Bienal Internacional de São Paulo , Curatorship , Art -- Commissioning , Art -- Political aspects , Matsoso, Leonard Tshehla Mohapi
- Language: English
- Type: thesis , text , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/174492 , vital:42482 , https://doi.org/10.21504/10962/174492
- Description: This thesis explores the distinction between commissioning and curating, adopting the Bienal de São Paulo (or Bienal) as its conceptual propeller and point of departure. The thesis regards exhibitions as palimpsests, in other words, platforms built on previous conscious or sublimated models, beyond the Venetian model inaugurated in 1895. By looking at world expositions, particularly the Cape presence at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, this project traces a lineage of commissioners, from Sir Henry Cole to Sydney Cowper through to the Director of the Pretoria Art Museum, Albert Werth. It distinguishes these men, their vision and allegiances from the curatorial model instantiated in South Africa by the late Okwui Enwezor as a consequence of the Second Johannesburg Biennale, held in 1997. The aim of this research has been to provide a partial but crucial account of this shift, and to remain attentive to the silences and deletions, to what happens in the interstice, at transitionary moments of ‘betweenness.’ I ask that readers consider the 1979 Bienal as an instance of an interstice where the occluded and silenced ghost of modernist artist Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso, who represented South Africa at the 1973 edition of the Bienal, garnering a substantial award for his work in drawing, resides. Matsoso was the first and only Black South African artist to receive this accolade. This thesis posits that Matsoso’s absence from the exhibition in 1979, an exhibition where he would rightly have featured, constitutes a curatorial haunting, wedged in the archive of the Bienal’s history, and an opportunity for revision and evaluation of commissioning vis-àvis curating. In reading the exhibition histories’ archive “along the grain” (Stoler 2002), the commissioner emerges as a man of letters, a privileged social category found in the archive; a colonial authority whose status was founded as much on his display of European learning as on his studied ignorance of local knowledge; an implementer of the taxonomic state and modernist art historical canon (in the case of Werth); a cultivator of the fine arts of deference, dissemblance and persuasion. At a later stage and moment of dissonance and disruption, the independent curator emerges to reconsider, question and expand the canon, distancing him/herself from the (South African) State to serve the artist or artists and a wider community. This research aims to contribute, albeit in a small way, to a reappraisal of the position of Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso in South African modernism, and the distinction between commissioning and curating. , Thesis (PhD)--Rhodes University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Fine Art, 2021
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021-04
- Authors: Dantas, Nancy Isabel
- Date: 2021-04
- Subjects: Bienal Internacional de São Paulo , Curatorship , Art -- Commissioning , Art -- Political aspects , Matsoso, Leonard Tshehla Mohapi
- Language: English
- Type: thesis , text , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/174492 , vital:42482 , https://doi.org/10.21504/10962/174492
- Description: This thesis explores the distinction between commissioning and curating, adopting the Bienal de São Paulo (or Bienal) as its conceptual propeller and point of departure. The thesis regards exhibitions as palimpsests, in other words, platforms built on previous conscious or sublimated models, beyond the Venetian model inaugurated in 1895. By looking at world expositions, particularly the Cape presence at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, this project traces a lineage of commissioners, from Sir Henry Cole to Sydney Cowper through to the Director of the Pretoria Art Museum, Albert Werth. It distinguishes these men, their vision and allegiances from the curatorial model instantiated in South Africa by the late Okwui Enwezor as a consequence of the Second Johannesburg Biennale, held in 1997. The aim of this research has been to provide a partial but crucial account of this shift, and to remain attentive to the silences and deletions, to what happens in the interstice, at transitionary moments of ‘betweenness.’ I ask that readers consider the 1979 Bienal as an instance of an interstice where the occluded and silenced ghost of modernist artist Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso, who represented South Africa at the 1973 edition of the Bienal, garnering a substantial award for his work in drawing, resides. Matsoso was the first and only Black South African artist to receive this accolade. This thesis posits that Matsoso’s absence from the exhibition in 1979, an exhibition where he would rightly have featured, constitutes a curatorial haunting, wedged in the archive of the Bienal’s history, and an opportunity for revision and evaluation of commissioning vis-àvis curating. In reading the exhibition histories’ archive “along the grain” (Stoler 2002), the commissioner emerges as a man of letters, a privileged social category found in the archive; a colonial authority whose status was founded as much on his display of European learning as on his studied ignorance of local knowledge; an implementer of the taxonomic state and modernist art historical canon (in the case of Werth); a cultivator of the fine arts of deference, dissemblance and persuasion. At a later stage and moment of dissonance and disruption, the independent curator emerges to reconsider, question and expand the canon, distancing him/herself from the (South African) State to serve the artist or artists and a wider community. This research aims to contribute, albeit in a small way, to a reappraisal of the position of Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso in South African modernism, and the distinction between commissioning and curating. , Thesis (PhD)--Rhodes University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Fine Art, 2021
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021-04
Visual narratives of division in contemporary Palestinian art and social space
- Authors: Baasch, Rachel Mary
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: Art, Palestinian Arab , Art, Palestinian Arab -- Political aspects , Art and society -- Palestine
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/41770 , vital:25132
- Description: This study analyses artworks by contemporary Palestinian artists that respond to visual narratives of division in social space from a perspective grounded in a South African context. The state of Israel is built on Historic Palestine. Political Zionism has created an ideological narrative of division that positions people of the Jewish faith as the rightful heirs to the land on which Palestinians have lived for centuries. In order to execute their vision of an exclusively Jewish nation state, the founding pioneers of political Zionism colonised and ethnically cleansed Historic Palestine, establishing Israel in 1948. To sustain the exclusive claim to Palestinian land, Israel has divided the space and the people in it at every possible level. The greatest testament to these efforts is the Israeli apartheid wall and checkpoint security system that can be described as a monumental visual narrative of division. With each second that passes, Israel claims more Palestinian land and expands on existing fences, walls and barriers. It is no secret that the Occupied Palestinian Territories are rapidly transforming into open-air prisons. Israel has stolen the Palestinian horizon line and replaced it with a concrete wall that blocks out light, vision and optimism. Within the shadows of these conflicted, traumatised sites of division, Palestinian artists seek openings, cracks and loopholes that signal the possibility for physical and psychological transgression of these seemingly impenetrable structures of division. I have developed a creative methodology that can be understood through the metaphor of ‘looking with the skin’ as a way to identify and analyse visual narratives of division and artistic responses to sites of division in Palestinian social space. Looking with the skin combines aspects of participant observation (specifically the emphasis on engaged fieldwork) from the discipline of Anthropology with the method of visual analysis from the discipline of Art History. In my application of this method through primary fieldwork conducted within the Occupied Palestinian West Bank Territory from 2013 and 2014, I have learnt that Israel’s colonisation, military occupation and system of apartheid directly impacts the ability of Palestinian artists to make and disseminate their work as well as the choice of content within their artwork. The artworks analysed in this thesis by the artists Khaled Jarrar, Y ael Bartana, Larissa Sansour, Hasan Darahgmeh, Fareh Saleh and Emily Jacir can be positioned in relation to artworks by artists based within a South African context, namely Thando Mama, Serge Alain Nitegeka and Doung Anwar Jahangeer. In this thesis I present a combination of my own photographic documentation of sites of division with the West Bank OPT in relation to the specific artworks made by the artists mentioned above. In my analysis of the photographic documentation and the artists’ work I highlight similarities, parallels, threads and intersecting narratives that connect different artists to one another and to the sites of division they are responding to within their artistic practice. This study carves a small conceptual pathway through ideological and physical walls from South Africa to Palestine through the study of contemporary art and visual culture.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
- Authors: Baasch, Rachel Mary
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: Art, Palestinian Arab , Art, Palestinian Arab -- Political aspects , Art and society -- Palestine
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/41770 , vital:25132
- Description: This study analyses artworks by contemporary Palestinian artists that respond to visual narratives of division in social space from a perspective grounded in a South African context. The state of Israel is built on Historic Palestine. Political Zionism has created an ideological narrative of division that positions people of the Jewish faith as the rightful heirs to the land on which Palestinians have lived for centuries. In order to execute their vision of an exclusively Jewish nation state, the founding pioneers of political Zionism colonised and ethnically cleansed Historic Palestine, establishing Israel in 1948. To sustain the exclusive claim to Palestinian land, Israel has divided the space and the people in it at every possible level. The greatest testament to these efforts is the Israeli apartheid wall and checkpoint security system that can be described as a monumental visual narrative of division. With each second that passes, Israel claims more Palestinian land and expands on existing fences, walls and barriers. It is no secret that the Occupied Palestinian Territories are rapidly transforming into open-air prisons. Israel has stolen the Palestinian horizon line and replaced it with a concrete wall that blocks out light, vision and optimism. Within the shadows of these conflicted, traumatised sites of division, Palestinian artists seek openings, cracks and loopholes that signal the possibility for physical and psychological transgression of these seemingly impenetrable structures of division. I have developed a creative methodology that can be understood through the metaphor of ‘looking with the skin’ as a way to identify and analyse visual narratives of division and artistic responses to sites of division in Palestinian social space. Looking with the skin combines aspects of participant observation (specifically the emphasis on engaged fieldwork) from the discipline of Anthropology with the method of visual analysis from the discipline of Art History. In my application of this method through primary fieldwork conducted within the Occupied Palestinian West Bank Territory from 2013 and 2014, I have learnt that Israel’s colonisation, military occupation and system of apartheid directly impacts the ability of Palestinian artists to make and disseminate their work as well as the choice of content within their artwork. The artworks analysed in this thesis by the artists Khaled Jarrar, Y ael Bartana, Larissa Sansour, Hasan Darahgmeh, Fareh Saleh and Emily Jacir can be positioned in relation to artworks by artists based within a South African context, namely Thando Mama, Serge Alain Nitegeka and Doung Anwar Jahangeer. In this thesis I present a combination of my own photographic documentation of sites of division with the West Bank OPT in relation to the specific artworks made by the artists mentioned above. In my analysis of the photographic documentation and the artists’ work I highlight similarities, parallels, threads and intersecting narratives that connect different artists to one another and to the sites of division they are responding to within their artistic practice. This study carves a small conceptual pathway through ideological and physical walls from South Africa to Palestine through the study of contemporary art and visual culture.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
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