Launch of Picturing Change Curating visual culture at post-apartheid universities

Thursday, 6 June, 2013 - 17:30

WiSER and Wits University Press invite you to the launch of

Brenda Schmahmann’s

Picturing Change
Curating visual culture at post-apartheid universities

05th June 2013
6:00-7:30

 

Speakers:  
Ivan Vladislavic (celebrated author of numerous well known South African novels and works of non-fiction, as well as works on visual culture, including photographs, sculpture and painting)
Monna Mokoena (Gallerist / Curator, Gallery MOMO, leading contemporary art entrepreneur)

 

Chair:             
Sarah Nuttall (Director of WiSER)

 

Since South Africa’s transition to democracy, many universities have acquired new works of art for key spaces on their campuses. The new works convey messages about the advantages of cultural diversity, and many engage critically with histories of racial intolerance and conflict. Moreover, in light of concerns about the influence of British imperialism or Afrikaner nationalism on aspects of their inherited visual culture, most tertiary institutions are debating strategies for managing their existing art collections, as well as memorials, insignia and regalia, that reflect values from which the universities now wish to distance themselves.

In Picturing Change, Brenda Schmahmann explores the implications of deploying the visual domain in the service of transformative agendas. Suggesting how engagement with imagery has enabled institutions to begin to redefine their identities, Schmahmann unpacks the complexities, contradictions and spillages involved in this process.

 

 

Brenda Schmahmann is a Professor in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. She is the editor of, and primary contributor to, Material Matters(2000), and co-editor of Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910-1994 (2005). Brenda is also the author of Through the Looking Glass: Representations of Self by South African Women Artists (2004) and Mapula: Embroidery and Empowerment in the Winterveld (2006).

 

RSVP: Corina.VanDerSpoel@wits.ac.za