scholarly journals Visual Autofiction: A Strategy for Cultural Inclusion

2022 ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Karen Ferreira-Meyers ◽  
Bontle Tau
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Visual Narratives ◽  
Cultural Inclusion ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Contemporary Artists

AbstractVisual autofiction can be seen as a storytelling method used by contemporary visual artists to initiate cultural inclusion within a field that has historically favored Western narratives and excluded many others. This chapter, which builds on theoretical reflections on autofiction, contends that contemporary artists endeavor to be culturally included in broad, decolonized visual narratives, through the use of innovative visual autofictional methods to represent their experiences. In the case of South African visual artist Bontle Tau, autofiction is used as a strategy to construct a multiform and multifaceted photographic narrative that foregrounds the diversity of selves and stories, further supporting the overall aim of cultural inclusion within representations in the field.

Sculptor in Prison

1980 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-37
Author(s):  
Pitika Ntuli
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
New York ◽  
South African ◽  
Old South ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Maximum Security

Pitika Ntuli is a 38-year-old South African artist, sculptor and poet who has been living and working in London since his release from the maximum security death cells of the Matsapa Central Prison in Swaziland ( see Brief Report, Index on Censorship 1/1979). Ntuli, who had been living in exile in Swaziland from 1963 up to the time of his arrest on 7 April 1978, was formerly artistic chairman of the Pan-Africanist Congress of South Africa, in Nigeria. In Swaziland, he established an art workshop for musicians, poets and visual artists. His work has been exhibited at several galleries and cultural centres in New York and was shown at FESTAC in Nigeria. Last October he participated in Amnesty International's first sculpture exhibition, ‘The Freedom of the Spirit’. Two manuscripts of a novel and poems which Pitika Ntuli wrote in prison, have been confiscated by the Swazi prison authorities. In this interview with Ahmed Rajab he talks about his imprisonment, his work, and the predicament of artists in repressive societies.

scholarly journals Introduction to the symposium: Ivan Vladislavić, writing visual culture, and the globalization of a South African “artworld”

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Reid ◽  
James Graham
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
South African ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
Art World ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Ivan Vladislavic ◽  
Exploded View ◽  
Visual Cultures

The introduction to this symposium considers South African author and editor Ivan Vladislavić’s engagement with South African visual culture and the significance of this to his emergence as a “world writer”. The symposium opens with an article by Sean O’Toole, which provides a comprehensive biographical context for Vladislavić’s engagement with art and proposes that his oeuvre be understood as a unique form of “creative criticism”. In their articles, Sue Marais and Jane Poyner offer close readings that draw out the critical role played by the visual cultures of the rarefied art world and everyday life, respectively, in two key texts where this creative criticism is in evidence: “Curiouser” from The Exploded View (2004) and Portrait with Keys (2006). James Graham’s article examines the nature and outcomes of Vladislavić’s work with other writers and visual artists as an editor, providing a theoretical framework that connects the biographical and formal concerns of the other articles by illustrating the cooperative ethos that undergirds Vladislavić’s critical and creative engagement with visual culture. The symposium therefore illustrates Vladislavić’s critical role in the negotiation of globalized artistic and literary fields, and in the constellation of a South African “artworld”.

scholarly journals Write Like a Visual Artist: Tracing artists’ work in Canada’s textually mediated art world

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janna Klostermann
Keyword(s):  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Institutional Ethnography ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Art World ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
Institutional Relations

This study examines the social organisation of Canada’s art world from the standpoint of practising visual artists. Bringing together theories of literacy and institutional ethnography, the article investigates the literacy practices of visual artists, making visible how artists use written texts to participate in public galleries and in the social and institutional relations of the art world. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, including interviews, observational field notes and textual analyses, this study sheds light on the ways visual artists enact particular texts, enact organisational processes, and to enact the social and conceptual worlds they are a part of. Through the lens of visual artists, this study locates two particular texts – the artist statement and the bio statement – in the extended social and institutional relations of the art world. 

Black Woman Museum Activism "From Inside": Theorizing a Twenty-First Century Decolonization Movement Within the Colonial U.S. Museum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Fabiola Vatel
Keyword(s):  
Black Atlantic ◽  
African Women ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Colonial Legacies ◽  
Institutional Agency ◽  
Museum Culture ◽  
Resistance Movement

What are the constitutive features of a transnational African women contemporary visual artist resistance movement from inside the colonial U.S. museum? How are accomplished women contemporary visual artists, from different countries within the continent of Africa, yet currently based in the U.S., returning the gaze on American museal culture? How should the woman black Atlantic audience respond to the museum institution's efforts to reframe its colonial legacies? Considering these research questions, I argued that when women contemporary visual artists from Africa are afforded the space to exhibit their artwork in the colonial U.S. museum, they return the gaze on colonial museum culture, advocate for themselves, other African artists, and as a result, the traditional colonial U.S. museum could potentially reframe its identity, transform into a dynamic site for sustained political activism, and become a more equitable space to feature artistic expressions from other non-white perspectives.This qualitative study grounded in critical postcolonial feminist theory drew from extant cultural studies and museum studies literature to elucidate how successful black Atlantic resistance movements are traditionally mobilized by activists who have closely analyzed white supremacist ideology from inside systemically oppressive institutions, by means of white insiders initially granting them that access. It employed a method of psychoanalysis to theorize how transnational African women contemporary visual artists who were granted access to exhibit in colonial U.S. museums can potentially harness their institutional agency to mobilize a resistance movement from inside the institution.

Post-Black Art and the Resurrection of African American Satire

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Conrad Murray
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Critical Survey ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Black Art ◽  
Generational Shift ◽  
Glenn Ligon ◽  
Contemporary Artists

This chapter undertakes a critical survey of a number of the most prominent African American visual artists whose satirical work engages with the “Post-Black” designation coined by Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon for the 2001 Freestyle show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This chapter argues that “Post-Black” artists represent a generational shift in subject matter, style, and rhetoric, separating these artists from those of the Civil Rights period. Key to this generational shift are the frustrations that accompany notions of identity and belongingness that contemporary artists find to be stifling and exclusionary.

scholarly journals Covert: the artist as voyeur

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Louise McKay
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Mechanical Device ◽  
Emergent Technologies ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Prosthetic Eye ◽  
Contemporary Artists

An engagement with the aesthetics, rhetorics and methodologies of surveillance presents a canvas on which visual artists can critique, subvert or just play with emergent technologies. This paper probes artistic methodologies that implicate surveillance and the ethical tensions of appropriating the surveilled lives of strangers for creative pursuits. The ethically challenging practices of several contemporary artists are discussed including Sophie Calle, and the author reflects upon her own body of work. The role of the artist, the nature of the gaze, privacy versus artistic expression, surveillance as an art platform and the eternal tensions between objectivity and subjectivity of using a mechanical device/prosthetic eye are explored.The photos accompanying the article can be seen on the Surveillance & Society photostream at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/surveillance_and_society/sets/72157638275795465/

scholarly journals Artist's block : the creation of a workshop to re-engage visual artists with their creative process by using the natural environment as a facilitator

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah P. Richards
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
University Of Technology ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Suitable Environment

The aim of this thesis is to research and create a workshop which will assist artists to engage with their creative process. I explore the possibility that by being in a natural environment the blocked artist can reengage with their creative process and unblock the debilitating effects of artist's block. I chose to complete this study through the Durban University of Technology, to engage myself in the focused task of reengaging myself with my creative process, to create a workshop through experience and related yet varied data that could assist others through my experience and reflections. The term 'artist's block', also known as 'creative block' or 'writer's block', is used to describe a visual artist's or a writer's inability to engage with their creative process. I refer to a variety of literary resources as well as the observations made through interviews, by a selection of South African artists about this debilitating and frustrating situation. I also examine what is meant by being engaged in a creative process, and examine various theories and suggestions from a broad selection of literature. I explore a selection of literary recourses and reflect on personal experiences to ascertain whether the notion that the natural environment can assist an artist in finding the necessary inspiration to reengage them with their creative process and is therefore a suitable environment to facilitate a workshop. To assist with this study I facilitated two workshop, one for Students of the Durban University of Technology and the other for a diverse group of artists. The facilitation ofa workshop needs to be a creative process and I use the analogy of an alchemical process to highlight the unfolding of a workshop experience. This study also takes a look at the skills required by a facilitator, the role of the participant and how a workshop may unfold as a creative process. I observe that Artist's block is part of the creative process, that a workshop can be facilitated to assist artists with 'artist's block' and reengage them with their creative process, and that the natural environment is a suitable facilitator for the creative process. Although not quantifiable, it was established that students could benefit from workshops which gave them a better understanding of their creative process and how to move past artist's block. This thesis reflects briefly on my paralleled experiences over this four year period as I reengaged with my creative process and created a body of work to be exhibited as partial requirement for the Master's qualification.

scholarly journals The Quiet Editor: Ivan Vladislavić and South African cultural production

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-69
Author(s):  
James Graham
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Final Outcome ◽  
Art World ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
Ivan Vladislavic

This article examines the literary and sociological significance of Ivan Vladislavić’s “double life” as both editor and writer. With reference to a number of his editorial roles as well as the joint projects he has worked on with writers and visual artists, the article considers how Vladislavić’s work with others spreads symbolic value. Described by one of his clients as the “quiet editor”, Vladislavić can be read as a new kind of author; what he terms “creative editing” as a new kind of writing, through which more traditional models of authorship and literary production are thrown into question — less Bourdieu’s “field of literary production” or Casanova’s “world literary space”, red in tooth and claw, and more Howard Becker’s “art world”: a convivial “network of cooperating people, all of whose work is essential to the final outcome”.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document