Leora Farber’s exhibition, Dis-Location / Re-Location, produced in collaboration with the design team Strangelove, traverses places and periods, from Victorian England, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern Europe, to colonial and contemporary South Africa. By means of various media - photographic prints, video, sculpture, sound art, and installation - the exhibition presents the intertwined and inconclusive narratives of three Jewish women. In this catalogue brochure Leora Farber’s work is showcased and accompanied by text explaining the work and artist’s intent.

“Style is a big thing in the township. If you look good you feel good. You forget about poverty and find pleasure in the things that you own. It has always been there. I think warriors themselves had a competition about whose spear shined the most,” says Monwabizi Mfobo, resident in the township of Langa.

The townships of Cape Town burst with creativity. They are the place where traditional African culture meets global youth cultures. Hip-hop has reached South Africa and is reinterpreted according to local conditions. Styles in fashion, dance and music are a way out of poverty. For the first time this fascinating street culture is presented outside South Africa. Tomorrow’s global subcultures are born in the big cities of the Third World.

Photographer Per Englund offers a brand new image of South Africa. In The Beautiful Struggle, the reader will meet youths talking about their lives and dreams. But life is still a struggle in a society in which the Apartheid structure is still evident.

The texts are written by Per Englund, Mlamli Figlan, born and raised in the township Guguletu and the Danish anthropologist Karen Waltorp. Foreword by Marika Griesehl, Swedish Television’s former Africa correspondent.

Critical Interventions, (published by Aachron Editions, in collaboration with David Krut Publishing), is a peer-reviewed journal of advanced research and writing on African art history and visual culture. Our mission is to provide a forum for cutting-edge scholarship in African art history and for sustained analysis of issues of urgent concern for the discipline that foregrounds both the history of Africa’s modernity and the historiography of African Art History. The journal proposes a critical intervention at a moment of great contradiction, when there are diminishing opportunities for new and in-depth scholarly research on African arts but also a parallel rise in interest in Africa’s modernity among scholars and students. We believe that studies grounded in research in Africa and based on deep knowledge of historical and contemporary experiences of African art and visual culture can illuminate the fields of modern and contemporary art history in ways that are otherwise invisible to specialists in contemporary art in general.

Critical Interventions focuses on the arts and visual cultures of global Africa, which encapsulates African and African Diaspora identities in the age of globalization. It provides a forum for investigating the value of African art/cultural knowledge in the global economy and its mediation protocols, reviewing in particular how this value is created via the politics of reception and commodification. The journal thus inaugurates a formal discourse on the aesthetics, politics, and economics of African cultural patrimony and African ownership of the intellectual property rights of its indigenous knowledge systems and forms of cultural practice. Through this focus it stakes out a ground on what promises to be the principal site of discursive engagement for the field of African art history in this century. Critical Interventions also hopes to make a substantial contribution to the future of African art studies by promoting the highest standards of critical analysis and by encouraging research that engages the intergenerational dynamics of the field.

Critical Interventions accepts submissions for review on an open and ongoing basis. Submissions may focus on any area of modern and contemporary art and visual or material culture, including popular art, neotraditional forms, studio art, film, photography, architecture, and new media. Essays addressing the problem of history in continental African art practice are welcome, especially those that engage directly with ideas of modernity and that propose or critique a clearly articulated methodology. We seek essays that illuminate the place of art in specific historical processes and evaluate the theories and methods produced through the study of African art history. We welcome contributions from scholars in related fields including media studies, philosophy, music, and the social sciences. Comparative work rooted in developments in Africa that links African art to the diasporas, to Europe, Asia, or to the Americas will also be considered.

For subscription enquiries in South Africa please contact David Krut Publishing on 011 880 5648.

Journal is R150 per issue in South Africa.

In the USA, Subscriptions are $50 for individuals and $80 for institutions. For US subscription inquiries, please contact:

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Ph.D.
Editor, Critical Interventions
c/o Aachron Editions
1555 West Fifth Street, Suite 255
Oxnard, CA 93030
USA
Email: ogbechie@gmail.com
Ph: 805-815-3540
Fax: 805-240-9591
www.aachron.com/editions/index.html

In Points For Departure ceramicist Dina Prinsloo documents her life’s work through a sumptuous collection of photographs, text, diagrams and notes. The book documents Prinsloo’s collaborations with prominent South African architects in which she has created sculptural objects and containers that become extensions of site and the built structure.

Prinsloo’s ceramic pieces draw their inspiration from the flora, soils and rocks of the Highveld. Pots echo the structure of the ‘Raasblare’ of the Combretum and Terminalia trees, while plant containers mimic the form and function of fertile rock crevices. Her pieces are always conceptualised on site in consultation with both architect and home-owner but nevertheless retain her characteristic organic, geometrical style. Prinsloo favours freeform construction and the abstraction of detail but one is always able to see traces of the surrounding vegetation, and sometimes even the personality of the home-owner, reflected in the piece.

Dina Prinsloo was born in Johannesburg where she continues to live and work. A BA and Honours Degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand followed by a Masters Degree in Languages from Unisa have provided the intellectual underpinning of the artist’s work, whilst a keen interest in and knowledge of the indigenous plants of the Highveld region have provided the inspiration for her unique ceramic pieces.

The book grew out of a thrilling workshop on tropical architecture held in 2004 on Réunion called “Architecture and Vegetation – Hybrid Home Spaces”, which is also the title of the book. The aim of the workshop was to create a net of connections between students in architecture from tropical countries and from Europe and to bring them to work together on tropical climate issues.

MTN and David Krut Publishing announce

the publication of

Messages and Meaning: The MTN Art Collection

In September 1997 MTN, one of the leading cell phone companies in South Africa, made a modest purchase of artworks by South African artists. This marked the beginning of what was to become a major corporate collection of South African art. Now eight years old, and comprising some 1400 African and South African works, the collection has been energetically researched, published, traveled, exhibited, discussed, debated and admired. With this new book, the MTN Art Collection has come of age.

The writers who have contributed essays to Messages and Meaning: The MTN Art Collection are renowned South African critics, art historians, anthropologists, and curators. Andries Oliphant, Emile Maurice, Nessa Leibhammer, Khwezi Gule, Pattabi Ganapathi Raman, Philippa Hobbs, Ronel Kellner, Colin Richards, Clive Kellner, Wilma Cruise, Judy Seidman, and Elizabeth Rankin share their insights on the artworks in the collection, the messages they embody, the stories they tell, the ideas they communicate and the spaces – both architectural and psychological – that they occupy. The essays explore a variety of topics: the ceramics, beadwork, and textiles in the collection; the problems and challenges of curatorship in South Africa; MTN’s extensive holdings of Resistance posters; sculpture and mixed-media works in the collection; the architecture of MTN’s new corporate headquarters; and MTN’s place in discussions on contemporary South African art.

Messages and Meaning, edited by MTN’s current resident art curator, Philippa Hobbs, with the assistance of two former curators, aims to be an informative, diverse, and sumptuous read for years to come. The book has been launched simultaneously with the first national touring exhibition of the MTN Art Collection.

Printmaking Resource

Artists Career Resource

Art from the African Continent

WIRED: CONTEMPORARY ZULU TELEPHONE WIRE BASKETS is the first book to document the development of wire weaving in South African art. With over 270 magnificent full colour images, Wired showcases the works of the most renowned contemporary weavers including Dudu Cele, Bheki Dlamini, Alice Gcaba, Zama Khanyile, Mboniseni Khanyile, Ntombifuthi Magwasa, Robert Majola, Zodwa Maphumulo, Simon Mavundla, Elliot Mkhize, Jaheni Mkhize, Alfred Ntuli, Bheki Sibiya, and Vincent Sithole. The foreword by Karel Nel, Associate Professor of Fine Art at Wits University, places the baskets in their historical and geographical contexts. Paul Mikula, founding trustee of the Bartel Arts Trust, architect, writer, and owner of the Phansi Museum, contributes a “Song of Praise” that celebrates the baskets and tells the story of their place in Nguni culture. Proceeds from sales of the book will go to the Wilson Education Foundation to fund education and development projects in South Africa.

The decorative use of wire has long been a feature of southern African art work and, with advancements in telecommunications, a new type of wire - multi-coloured, plastic-coated copper wire, referred to as telephone wire - has become available. In the late 1960s Zulu night watchmen started weaving scraps of this wire around their traditional sticks. The practice became popular among Zulu communities and today there is great innovation and creativity in the use of this medium. Artists have produced goods ranging from soft wire bowls and plates to glass bottle covers, tea sets, isikhetho (beer strainers), and pots, all created in a wide variety of colours and complex patterns.

David Arment, one of the authors of Wired, had travelled extensively in southern Africa when he bought his first telephone-wire basket in the early 90s. He developed a passion for collecting baskets and since then has established, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the premier collection of baskets by contemporary wire weavers. Meanwhile, Marisa Fick-Jordaan, Arment’s co-author, was developing her own passion for baskets while she worked with the weavers of Siyanda (a residential area outside Durban). Fick-Jordaan set up the Bartel Arts Trust (BAT) Shop, which supplies telephone-wire baskets to art shops around the world. Through the marketing efforts of the BAT shop and with the assistance of many other collaborators, these pieces have found their way to Paris, London, New York, and Los Angeles. Photographs by Andrew Cerino.