Ja. In Bloom Edition

In Bloom A group exhibition

by Ja.Magazine

Artist catalogue

In Bloom

A Group Exhibition by Ja. Magazine 26 September - 15 October 2017 Mezzanine Gallery, KZNSA

Ja. Magazine hosts their first group exhibition in Durban, featuring a range of works from the publication’s past and present contributors. The exhibition is curated by the Ja. team Youlendree Appasamy, Dave Mann and Niamh WalshVorster with guest visual editor, Mandisa Buthelezi.

The group exhibition In Bloom is a project by Ja. Magazine in partnership with the KZNSA Gallery.

In Bloom seeks to showcase a new wave of South African independent art and creativity.

Comprising multimedia work, photography, illustration, street art, and literature, the exhibition brings together the varying narratives, identities, and observations of an emergent South African creative community. The works featured in this exhibition have been inspired by and created in, city centers, small towns, online spheres, homes and more. Each work, in its own way, attempts to bring to light the complexities, absurdities, and even the small celebrations of a life lived through art.

Ja. Magazine is an award-winning, independent digital publication that publishes new written and visual work from South Africa. Founded in late 2014, the publication has gone on to feature the works of numerous emergent and established writers, poets, artists, musicians, and more. Ja. Magazine has also hosted creative workshops and events in an effort to tap into offline cultures of creativity, and interest in the local arts.

This exhibition serves as another extension of the publication’s continued efforts to promote local art and literature on a national level.

Each zine edition was put together by hand.

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@Ja.Magazine @Jamagsa

Andiswa ‘Andy’ Mkosi

Photography

LANGA PROJECT

THE PRAYING MAN

ANELISA’S SPIRIT

Shalom Mushwana

YELLOW WALK

PALERMO

BLAZERS

Robyn Perros

FLORAL

MOURNING

1389

LIGHT

Nosipho Nxele

Illustration

SHARED GREATNESS

SENSORY PERCEPTIONS

DISATTACHMENT

Hannah Shone

I DON’T UNDERSTAND BANANAS, REALLY

WHEN IS IT MY TURN TO SLEEP

DO NOT COPY/PASTE

Werner Goss-Ross

Painting

RAT DOG

EXISTENTIAL ZEBRA

Artists Andiswa ‘Andy’ Mkosi makes art for herself. As a photographer, she uses art to reflect and interpret life as it exists both outside and behind her eyes. Her photography is an extension of this reflexive exploration of the world around her, a way of understanding her own lived experience, and she presents her observations with a startling sincerity.

Andy delivers a critical view of modern life, side by side with a deep exploration of self. She holds contemporary society up to the light to see where the holes are, investigating how our chaotic world affects herself and her peers.

Dani O’Neill is a female visual-film artist and photographer from South Africa currently living and working in the USA. Her creative work focuses on intimate conversations around representation, identity, and gendered agenda through lens work, experimental parody, and image language in a post-internet space.

Her primary mediums of work consist of multimedia photography (film and digital), digital art and glitch video work.

By looking at spaces of existence and self-reflection, the artist attempts to play with the language of images in ways that are subtly dystopic, deconstructing and humourous, and use the language of camera as both a tool and a weaponised medium of reproducing multiple gazes and questioning ways of seeing.

Maya Surya Pillay is a brown queer girl who was born in 1997 in Durban. She started telling stories before she learned how to write them down. She is currently a medical student at the University of Cape Town, and wants to practice as a narrative psychiatrist within the public sector. She asked her friends how they would describe her so she could write this bio and they said “angry” and “short”, which aren’t wrong.

Pillay is also a writer and activist. Her work currently focuses on deconstructing and reconstructing South African Indian identity; race, gender, sexuality and mental health; postcolonial trauma and healing; digital childhood; the intimacies and distances of medicine; and dreams.

Her writing has appeared here and there, including in the American Poetry Review, Q-Zine, Afridiaspora, Type/Cast, AERODROME and Ja. Magazine. You can find her at @ actualpichachi on Instagram.

Robyn Perros is a writer, documentary-photographer, and multimedia artist currently based in Durban, Kwa-Zulu Natal. With training in Journalism and Ethnomusicology from the University Currently Known and As Rhodes, and a short background in the magazine industry, Perros soon discovered a discomfort with the lack of depth in traditional journalism practices. Today she is combining and exploring alternative methods of storytelling using analogue photography, video, public performance and social experimentation as her predominant mediums.

Her work explores the social dynamics of public space, the borders between physical and non-physical, displacement, the role of digital media and photography and what it means to be human today. Her last body of work titled: [WO]MANNEQUIN was exhibited at The Other Room Durban in May 2017. Self-reflection, collaboration and participation is a priority in her production.

Shalom Mushwana was born in Grahamstown, South Africa, Mushwana is currently based in the Greater Gauteng region in South Africa. Mushwana is an artist and photographer specialising in video, printmaking, drawing, and mixed media. His work deals with the transience of space and memory in a perpetually globalising South Africa. Mushwana makes use of a variety of mediums to engage with and express the social, economic, and historical concerns of contemporary South Africa. He is currently working towards completing the Advanced Program in Photography at The Market Photo Workshop.

Nosipho Nxele is a young self-taught female illustrator and art director based in JHB, originally from KZN. She has a great passion for women empowerment and breaking stereotypes placed on women by society. Most of the artist’s work is influenced by her own mental illness and she now hopes to teach society, especially black South Africans, that depression exists and that it’s not a ‘white people problem’.

Nxele’s work can be termed as Surrealist Illustration and mostly covers expressionism, mental illness, religion, feminism and other topics that affect women in society, all heavily influenced by philosophical studies and surrealism.

Julie Nxadi is an observer, thinker and a writer, born in East London and now based in Cape Town as a fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. Her work has appeared in Ja. magazine and more recently, The Johannesburg Review of Books.

Her short prose piece, ‘This is not a sad story’ was published in Edition 10 of Ja. magazine and was selected by In Bloom’s guest visual editor, Mandisa Buthelezi to be produced as a multimedia piece which forms part of the exhibition.

Follow Julie on Twitter: @julie_nxadi

Hannah Shone is a 24 year old graphic designer and illustrator for Braamfontein-based brand consultancy The Bread.

Having graduated from Vega School of Brand Leadership with a distinction in her BA Visual Communications in 2015, she moved back to Joburg to start her career. Since then, she has spent her spare time illustrating and building on ideas that were conceived while she was studying. With her debut solo exhibition, This Must Be The Place (2016), which illustrations screen-printed onto monoprinted blue and neon pink backgrounds.

Shone’s style is whimsical, adventurous and somewhat obscure. However, the conceptualisation of each piece can be found in their titles. One could say Fantasma’s pieces are Shone’s daydreams brought to life on paper. Shone has contributed to local zine Bat Butt, is participating in an upcoming group show at No End Contemporary Art Space and has several collaborations in the pipeline. You can see more of her work at hannahshone.com.

Werner Goss-Ross is a Cape Town based artist and designer, originally from Mtunzini in KwaZulu-Natal. Werner leaves a place for humour and contemplation. He likes to show the complexity of words, to make brushstrokes have their own personality and create a joyful experience for the viewer. “Because that’s what its all really about.”

Kevin Ngwenya aka Kev Seven, is a Durban graffiti and mural artist who lives and works in Durban.

He attended Nanda Sooben’s school of Fine Art, Animation & Design where his work began to take shape through the artist’s fascination with comic book illustrations and love for the architectural textures of his city. After graduating with an Integrated FineArt & Design Diploma, he then pursued a Bachelor of Arts Degree at The University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in 2013 and majored in English, Media, Cultural Studies and Music. This combination in education created a symbiotic relationship between public arts, design, and its impact and influence on modern pop-culture media and society which would become the core subject of his work.

Ngwenya’s influences stem from the New York subway and street art movements in the early 1980’s. He sources inspiration from his everyday encounters navigating within his city, conversing with its people, and paying homage to his childhood cultural icons, which play a vital role in his artistic and creative upbringing.

His work has appeared in numerous publications, exhibitions, and brand partnerships throughout the years.

Curators

Youlendree Appasamy is a Joburg-based writer, editor, and communicator who is finding her way through the scam-academy. She likes dreams - and is writing a thesis about the ordinaryness of healing in a small sugar-cane town called Verulam.

She is a Ja. magazine editorial member, and former production intern at The Mail&Guardian.

Appasamy has written for a number of publications including The Mail&Guardian, Kajal Magazine, and The Sowetan.

Dave Mann is a writer, editor and arts journalist currently living and working in Johannesburg.

He is the former managing editor of South African arts publication, Between 10and5, and is the co-founder and publisher of Ja. magazine. Mann has been awarded a BASA Arts Journalism Award for longform journalism, as well as the MEC Provincial Arts and Culture Award for his coverage of community-based arts in the Eastern Cape.

He has written for The Con Mag, The Mail&Guardian, CasimirTV, Creative Feel, ArtThrob, and more.

Niamh Walsh-Vorster is an independent photographer and freelancer living and working in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal.

After completing a degree in Photojournalism, Media Studies, and Anthroplology at the University Currently Known as Rhodes, she went on to intern at LiveMag in Cape Town in 2015. Her first solo exhibition, The Faithful was held at The Central Methodist Church in Cape Town that same year.

She has also worked for Independent Newspapers in Durban, been a student and volunteer for The Durban Centre for Photography, and is the co-founder and co-publisher of Ja. Magazine. In 2016 she was awarded a BASA Arts Journalism Award for her work with Ja. Magazine.

Walsh-Vorster is interested in exploring ‘space and place’ theory through photography. She is currently part of the third edition of the Incubator Programme at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg.

Guest visual editor

Mandisa Buthelezi is a photographer and filmmaker who was raised in the township of Umlazi, in Durban.

With a portfolio that communicates the rural voice, and an appreciation and respect for the culture that has informed her perspective, she is keen on providing film and photographic content that is country-life centered, and challenges the notions of identity and spirituality. The importance of cataloguing and documenting African culture through visual art has become an important component of her work.

Buthelezi’s achievements include the 2016 Studio Vortex residency, being exhibited at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in 2016 in a group exhibition titled ‘AMANDLA! A Celebration of South African Women Photographers’, and at the Semaphore Gallery in Switzerland under the group exhibition titled ANOMALIES. Buthelezi recently completed a year-long Market Photo Workshop Incubator Programme, working on a body of work focusing on African spirituality & personal identity titled Egecekeni.

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