8.Department of Fine

Art Staff Profiles

Bettina Malcolmess

Bettina Malcomess is a writer and an artist, also working under the name Anne Historical. Their work exists in a diverse set of forms, from long duration performance to staging situations and installations to the book as a site of practice. A practice inhabiting multivocality and density, embodied research and material investigation. Since 2015, Anne Historical has been working with analogue film and sound media to produce a series of works that inhabit the entanglement of memory, technology and history. Treating what is lost in translation as both sonic and luminescent matter, these works constitute a set of unfinished articulations, in counterpoint voices, signals and gestures, making tangible the invisible politics of historical technology. An attempt to queer the signal.

Malcomess has been teaching at the Wits School of Arts, Johannesburg since 2011 and is currently completing a PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London, a media archeology project researching the history of cinema, telegraphy, heliography, cartography and empire. They coauthored the book Not No Place. Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times (Jacana, 2013) and was the visual editor of Routes and Rites to the City: Mobility, Diversity and Religious Space in Johannesburg (Palgrave, 2017). She is also widely published as a critical and creative writer.

Historical/Malcomess’ work has shown at the Spier Light Art Festival, Cape Town (2020), ICA, Cape Town (2019), ausland, Berlin (2018), Padiglione de Arte Contemporanea (PAC), Milan (2017), Dak’art Biennale, Senegal (2016), the Johannesburg Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015) and at the La Maison Rouge, Paris and Dresden for the ‘My Joburg’ exhibition (2013). She has collaborated with Betonsalon, Paris (2016) and the Showroom, London (2017). Malcomess cocurated the group exhibition Us with Simon Njami, with iterations at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2009) and the Iziko South African

National Gallery in Cape Town (2010). In 2018 Malcomess formed an interdisciplinary platform focused on performative practice called the joining room. This was invited by William Kentridge in collaboration with Bhavisha Panchia’s Nothing to Commit Records to form part of Season 3 at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg (2018). She is part of several ongoing collaborations in Berlin with the sound performance space, ausland.

Research interests and areas:

-media archeology, technology and race

-performance, sound art and theatre

-history, narration and archives

-creative writing, queer studies and science fiction

-film histories and analogue film

-books as visual practices

David Andrew

David Andrew is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Fine Arts at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He studied at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, (BA Fine Arts 1985) and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, (H Dip Ed (PG) 1986; PhD 2011, Title: The artist’s sensibility and multimodality: classrooms as works of art). He is a practising artist and lectures in Fine Arts and Arts Education courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His interest in the artist-teacher relationship has resulted in a number of projects aimed at researching, designing and implementing alternative paths for the training of arts educators and artists working in schools. In the period 2003 to 2008 he jointly coordinated the Curriculum Development Project Trust-Wits School of Arts partnership that developed the Advanced Certificate in Education (Arts and Culture) and the Artists in Schools and Community Art Centres programmes. Current research interests include the tracking of histories of arts education in South Africa and southern Africa more broadly; the Another Road Map School Africa Cluster research project with researchers in Cairo, Harare, Kampala, Kinshasa, Johannesburg, Lubumbashi, Maseru and Nyanza; the On Location research project with the Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm, Sweden; and the reimagining of the arts school and artistic research in the context of the Global South. He was a member of the organising team for the first NEPAD Regional Conference on Arts Education in Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa, 2015) and participated in the second NEPAD Regional Conference on Arts Education in Africa held in Cairo, Egypt, May 2017. In March 2017 he co-convened the ArtSearch Symposium on Artistic Research with Professor Jyoti Mistry at The Dance Factory, Johannesburg. He has presented at numerous conferences including the InSEA Conference in Budapest, Hungary (July 2011) and the Arts in Society Conference also in Budapest, Hungary, (June 2013). In May 2013 he was invited to attend the World Summit for Arts Education in Munich and WildbadKreuth, Germany. One of his most recent publications, An aesthetic language for teaching and learning: multimodality and contemporary art practice is included in the volume Multimodal approaches to research and pedagogy: Recognition, resources and access (2014). His most recent publications are Pedagogies and practices of disaffection: Film programmes in arts schools in a time of revolution, Journal of African Cinemas, Volume 9 Numbers 2 & 3 (2017), co-authored wIth Professor Jyoti Mistry, and Notes from Johannesburg - Dialogues and Itineraries of the South from Kinshasa: Art, History, and Education in ARTL@S BULLETIN, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (Spring 2018). He recently convened the Rorke’s Drift, Histories and Pedagogies – Stories told and yet not told Symposium in Johannesburg, South Africa (5-6 April 2019).

Dorothee Kreutzfeldt

Dorothee Kreutzfeldt lives and works in Johannesburg. Her artistic practice and research have been pre-occupied with spatial realities and imaginations, particularly in the post-Apartheid context of South Africa. This has included researching the impact of bomb attacks in Cape Town in 1999 (‘Fresh’ Residency, 2001), to the ways in which histories are written into the contested and often violent urban fabric of Johannesburg. She completed her MA FA with distinction (2004), which involved collaborations with sign-writers on a series of paintings for ‘mothballed’ buildings in Johannesburg, including the former

Trades Hall which was the site of a miner’s ‘revolt’ in 1922. She was involved in building the artist’s collective Joubert Park Project at the Drill Hall in 2004, which aimed to build artist collaborations and networks that addressed the site and its role as a military base and courtroom during the 1956 Treason Trial in the city centre. In 2014 Kreutzfeldt copublished the book Not No Place, Johannesburg Fragments of Spaces and Times with Bettina Malcomess, which evolved out of five years of research. In all these different projects and initiatives, Kreutzfeldt returns to the details, re-inventions and stresses of spaces, to questions of who built them, how they are adapted and become unreadable structures or fictional memory. Kreutzfeldt lectures in the Fine Arts Department at the WITS University (since 2011). She is represented by Blank Projects, a gallery based in Cape Town. Her latest collaboration, City Without A Sun, consisted of a series of paintings with artist Blake Daniels (http://www.blankprojects.com).

Research interests –painting, urbanism, spatial practices and culture, collectives and artists collaborations, socially/politically/historically informed art practice, inter-disciplinarity and representation, lensbased media, African literature, violence studies, resilience and healing http://www.gabriellegoliath.com

Gallery in Makhanda, and the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg. Goliath has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize/Special Prize (2019), the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), as well as the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including the TATE Modern, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate with the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. I locate my research interests at the intersections of trauma theory, visual studies and performance, through the lenses of (post)colonial, decolonial, black feminist, and queer theory.

Joshua Williams

Gabrielle Goliath

Gabrielle Goliath situates her practice within contexts marked by the traces, disparities and asof-yet unreconciled traumas of colonialism and apartheid, as well as socially entrenched structures of patriarchal power and rape-culture. Enabling opportunities for affective, relational encounters, she seeks to resist the violence through which black, brown, feminine, queer and vulnerable bodies are routinely fixed through forms of representation.

Goliath has exhibited widely, most recently in Le Guess Who, Utrecht; Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev; Conversations in Gondwana, São Paulo Cultural Center, São Paulo; Kubatana – An Exhibition with Contemporary African Artists, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway; Verbo Performance Art Festival, São Paulo, and the Palais de Tokyo’s Do Disturb Festival, Paris. Her solo exhibition, This song is for… is currently installed at the Iziko South African National Gallery, having previously shown at the Monument

Joshua Williams was born in Cape Town, South Africa, where he completed a BA in Fine Arts (2013) and Masters of Fine Arts (2018) at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Williams trained in sculpture, however works interdisciplinary between sculpture and painting between image and object. Central to his practice is forms of mark making with reference to space and time which extend to notions of memory and archival practices. Broader research interests include intersections of identity, race, trauma (intergenerational and national) and how this informs culture individually and collectively.

Mbali Dhlamini

Mbali Dhlamini (b. Johannesburg, South Africa, 1990; MA University of the Witwatersrand, 2015) is a multidisciplinary artist and visual researcher. Dhlamini performs visual, tactile and discursive investigations into current indigenous cultural practices. With a view towards decolonized practices in contemporary culture, her work is in constant conversation with her past and present visual landscapes. Working to maintain a state of unlearning and relearning, Dhlamini’s process recognises language as a medium of understanding and as a repository of knowledge. She is a member of Pre Empt Collective, the recipients of the 2021-2022 Javett UP Visionary award.

Natasha Christopher

Natasha Christopher is an artist and academic based in Johannesburg. She has an MA (Fine Arts) from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (2007) and completed her undergraduate studies, majoring in sculpture and photography, at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town (1991). She is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Practice at Wits University and is a PhD Fellow at the Wits Cities Institute. The title of her research is Welkom to Johannesburg, and explores the use of plant life in Johannesburg, and gardens in the Garden City of Welkom, in the Free State Goldfields, as evocations of the two cities’ socio-political histories. Christopher is a full-time faculty member at Wits School of Arts, where she has been teaching photography and studio practice since 2010. Her photographic work consistently evidences her search for intimacy and the personal in all subject matter, whether in the city or the personal domain, keenly considering her position in relation to these subjects, as well as her implicatedness as photographer in the broader power contentions and problematics of photography as a medium.

As Mma Tseleng, I plays music to expand his my research into the social, political and economic significance of South African music, with Kwaito at the centre of my work. My research and experiments into South African music histories is published in two books…

- Not No Place by Dorothee Kreutzfeldt and Bettina Malcomess (2013)

- Space Between Us (English/German) edited by Marie-Hélène Gutberlet (2013)

Sonic talks/lectures at events such as the:

- 10 Cities public sphere symposium and concert in Kenya (2013)

- Year After Zero conference in Germany (2013)

- Someone who knows something, and Someone who know something else: Education and Equality symposium of the 9th Bienal do Mercosul in Brazil (2013)

- Stimela: Migration and Song in Southern African Song, Night School (2017)

- Sonic Speculations into Kwaito: documenta14 (2017)

- Kaya FM, Johannesburg (2017)

- Go tsamaya ke go di bona; Emancipatory Epistemologies, Humanities Graduate Center, Universty of the Witwatersrand

Rangoato Hlasane

Rangoato Hlasane is a cultural worker, writer, DJ, educator and cofounder of Keleketla! Library in Johannesburg and the Molepo Dinaka/ Kiba Festival in Polokwane. He holds a masters degree in Visual Art from the University of Johannesburg and teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he is an active member of the community and a PhD candidate.

Rangoato is committed to ‘art/s education’ with a social justice agenda including a selection of written contributions:

- 58 Years to the Treason Trial: Intergenerational Dialogue as a tool for Learning (2014)

- Guest author with Malose Malahlela for the 2014 book Creating Spaces: Non-formal Art/s Education and Vocational Training for Artists in Africa Between Cultural Policies and Cultural Funding (English/ German/French) by Nicola Laure Al-Samarai (2014)

- We believe a library is everything (English/Portuguese) Multi-authored case study of Keleketla! Library in the Brazil-based journal, Mesa (No3: Publicness in Art, 2015)

Curation/Commissions

Thath’i Cover Okestra, co-curated with Malose Malahlela, is an experiment in ‘writing’ (South) African music histories and rerouting their family trees.

Vol 5 (Berlin, Germany, 2018)

Sharlene Khan

Sharlene Khan is a South African visual artist and scholar. Khan works in a range of media which focus on the intersectionality of race, gender and class and the socio-political realities of a post-apartheid, postcolonial society. She uses masquerading as a decolonising strategy to interrogate her South African heritage, as well as the constructedness of identity via rote education, art discourses, historical narratives and popular culture. She has exhibited in various local and international exhibitions, and has participated in a number of international visual artist workshops and residency programmes. She was recipient of the http://artonourmind.org.za https://afemsconference.wixsite.com/afemsconference/ https://blackfeministreadinggroup.wordpress.com/ https://decolonialaesthesiscreativelab2018.wordpress.com/ https://sharlenekhan.co.za/

Rockefeller Bellagio Visual Arts residency in 2009. She is second prize winner of the German 2015 VKP Bremen Video art award and has been twice nominated for the South African Women in Arts Award (Painting). She is a 2017 recipient of the American Learned Councils African Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship and a 2018 winner of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Science Award in the Visual Arts category. She has presented academic articles and performances at numerous conferences internationally and has published articles in Manifesta, Springerin, Artlink, Artthrob, Art South Africa. She holds a PhD in Arts from Goldsmiths College and has lectured in Visual Arts at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and in Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University. She runs the project Art on our Mind, that holds public dialogues with South African women-of-colour visual artists on their creative methodologies. She is also co-convener of the African Feminisms (Afems) Conference. She is the editor and publisher of the artist books What I look like, What I feel like (2008); I Make Art (2017) and When the moon waxes red (2019).

Her research interests include race studies, black-Afrocentric feminist creative methodologies, postcolonialism, South African visual arts, performativity, African literature, crime fiction, science fiction, film, popular culture (particularly mural studies) and decolonialising aesthetics.

Micheal Cheesman, Landscape Entanglements: exploring Johannesburg and a family archive, MAFA exhibition installation, 2019

Tracey Rose

Tracey Rose was born in 1974 in Durban, South Africa. She holds a Master of Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK) and received her B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 1996. She was trained in editing and cinematography at The South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance in Johannesburg.

Rose belongs to a generation of artists charged with reinventing the artistic gesture in post-Apartheid South Africa. Within this fold, she has defined a provocative visual world whose complexities reflect those of the task at hand. Refusing to simplify reality for the sake of clarity, the artist creates rich characters that inhabit worlds as interrelated as the many facets of a human personality. Her reference to theatre and the carnival tradition also places her work in the realm of satire. As such, it has consistently questioned and challenged the prevalent aesthetics of international contemporary art, the emergence of a dominant cultural narrative of struggle and reconciliation in South Africa and also post colonial, racial and feminist issues in the wider world. Working with performance, often for the camera, Tracey Rose places her body at the center of her practice. She inhabits the roles given to Africans, to African women, and to women in a male dominated world, swallowing stereotypes whole. In her quest to understand the source of these cultural meanings that define the human condition, Rose is inevitably led to religious myths of creation. The scope of Rose’s work is not limited to the boundaries of South Africa, and it has indeed quickly found a global, humanist resonance.

Rose has exhibited and performed widely both at home and internationally, including the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Dakar Biennial in 2000 & 2016; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; The Project, New York; Venice Biennial, 2001 & 2007; The Haywood Gallery, London; The Brooklyn Museum; Tate Liverpool; Bildmuseet, Umea; and most recently Museo Reina Sofia; WIELS Brussels; Dan Gunn, Berlin; EVA International, Limerick; the São Paulo Biennial; Biennial of Moving Images, Geneva; Museum of Modern Art, Buenos

Aires; Documenta 14, Athens & Kassel; and her upcoming mid-career retrospective at Zietz MOCAA entitled “Shooting Down Babylon”. My interests are broad and diverse, but for now my focus is on the following: Performance Art; Video Art; Installation Art; Photography; African Spiritual Practices, and Shamanism.

Zen Marie

Zen Marie is an artist who works in a variety of media. Core to his practice is a concern with how meaning and possibilities are produced through material and immaterial site, space and place.

While working from a position that often begins with photography and film making this extends into performance, sculpture, graphic processes and writing. His areas of focus have included international sport, identity, nationalism, public infrastructure, food, urban space, aesthetics and forays into undisciplined decolonial philosophy. The links between these diverse areas is around the relationship between desire, power, agency and their subversive or revolutionary potential.

Marie currently lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he is a Lecturer in Fine Art at the WITS School of Art. He is also a PhD candidate at WITS, with a focus on areas of art and theory in relation to what he calls situated aesthetic practice.

Next pages: Bev Butkow, embodied entanglements / entangled embodiements MAFA Exhibition Installation, 2021