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The doors of culture shall be opened is an audio-visual exhibition and self-reflexive research project that unpacks transnational identity, historical entanglements, and the living archive, through Medu Art Ensemble as the case in point. The project expands on the relationship ‘between Medu and Me', as a method of engaging fragments of the archive, the construction of history, and identity formation across Botswana and South Africa. As the culmination of research and fieldwork in Gaborone and Cape Town from 2019 to 2021, the title of the exhibition references a Medu poster once housed in the University of Cape Town's Special Collections Library. The project aims to unpack and sound a space that centres dislocation, by providing some analysis of the post-traumas of Botswana in the anti-Apartheid struggle, with an emphasis on lived experiences, as well as oral traditions of storytelling and radio. The exhibition and accompanying research document work together to present creative and scholarly ideation of the relationship between art and history in contemporary Botswana and South Africa. With a look at history as circular and cyclical, the project uses a narrative tone in order to engage in an open dialogue with fragments of the archive. In this way, I map the interconnected timelines of individual and collective memory, using photography, sound, installation and sculpture (namely ceramics and assemblage). With a focus on Medu, I engage an extended conversation of Botswana's national history as entangled with aspects of South Africa's. By tracing a coming-of-age story of identity formation across neighbouring nation-states, I simultaneously unpack transnational identity through an exploration of the living archive. With a look at sound as spatialised and socialised, I reengage the interlocutors of history, as in circular motion with my individual present and collective future.

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Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-104). / This dissertation explicates the work produced during the course of my Masters of Fine Art (MFA) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. For a better understanding of this body of work, it is important that I relate the events in part that led up to its production. My intention from the start (in selecting a change of working location from The Netherlands to South Africa) was to test my practice, not only against the practical and theoretical contingencies influencing its production up to the end of 2003, but also how a specific geographical and political milieu affects its making. To do this I need to interrogate both bodies of works, those produced immediately before my MFA, as well as those arising during my studies in Cape Town. My art-historical field of reference consists mainly of West European and twentieth century American art and art theory.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-110). / This text offers an exploration into painting and metaphysical states of being and provides a framework for the reception of my body of work submitted for an MFA degree. In this project I am concerned with the translation of personal experiences to a canvas marked with oil paint. The experiences engage memories and stories mined from my family photographs, while also located in an experience of illness in my own body. Rather than directly illustrate these events, I have engaged with associated emotional states, such as feelings of loss, fear and uncertainty. My concerns are expressed either through fragmented or dismembered painted figures, or are engaged through the medium's materiality, explored and evoked through the visual and visceral qualities of a painted surface. An important part of my reading on carefully posed groups in formal family photographs is Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography. Narrative and Post memory (1997). Gathered at symbolic rites of passage, the family photograph offers ideal images of certitude, of familial togetherness and of happiness. In this body of work I reject the appearance of stability and search my family photographs for traces of ambivalent and unsettled bodily or emotional experiences.

Bibliography: leaves 45-47. / This explication is an inquiry into familial images of the past and the relationship of these images to history, memory and the present. Because some of these relationships are problematic, alternative ways of looking at memory and familial images through the medium of video are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the idea of a more visceral filmic language that attempts to access memory through the senses. I also discuss development of both my theoretical and practical concerns through the planning, production, post-production and completion of my final video, 'The Nanny, the Granny, the Momma and Me' (2004).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-111). / Salt in the Wound comprises a body of creative work supported by a theoretical discussion that critiques a patriarchally informed and imposed process of control over female reproduction and abortion. It also endeavours to explore social and psychological complexities and paradoxes attendant on the choice to abort a pregnancy. I survey contemporary effects of a western ideology developed in the 18th century, which proposed that the sole purpose of heterosexual sex should be procreation and that it should take place within marriage. In essence however, it is the corollary of this ideology that is my particular concern, this being the persistent inclination of western societies to perceive abortion in terms of a feminine defiance against a societal norm of maternal self-sacrifice.

Includes abstract.|Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-46). / This paper attempts to set out the parameters for a discussion of my Masters exhibition, entitled Out of Sight. It traces out the progress of this exhibition over the course of two years, attempting to account for the parallel development of my work across the media of sculpture, drawing and figure painting. As such the paper traces out my engagement with the two major thematic concerns of my masters exhibition: the representation of the gay male body and architectural space and site. The latter concerns both my strategies for the re-modelling of the gallery space, and my approach to the representation of the specific site of Graaff's Pool, on the Sea Point Promenade in Cape Town. I set out to explain how this site, located in a liminal space, geologically, architecturally and historically, becomes a nodal point for the concerns of my masters project. As such, I begin to trace out the .themes that intersect in my sculptural re-presentations of the site of Graaff's pool operating within zones of visibility and invisibility. My translation of this site into a site-specific installation in the gallery space intentionally disturbs the viewer's ability to see, in its treatment of scale and surface, as well as obstructs and directs their movement through the space. This discussion of visibility lin visibility extends to my treatment of the figure in drawings and watercolours, paying particular attention to my working of the surface in order to trouble the act of looking, hence the visibility or presence of the figure. This enables me to introduce ideas around the difficulties of representation in general, but particularly of the gay male body and the expression of a gay male subjectivity. I introduce into my discussion, if cautiously, the ideas of Michel Foucault and Mikhael Bakhtin. I do not in any way present a synthesis of these ideas, but begin to introduce their thinking as a way of reading specific works in the exhibition. As such, I trace out a possible connection between Foucault's idea of powerlknowledge and the invisible operation of disciplinary power as placing limits on the representation of the gay male body, and as such on its visibility.

Bibliography: p. 90-93. / In today's capitalist society, the environment of the home has become increasingly insular. Though there may be television, Internet and other forms of technology that connect one to the 'outside world', time spent indoors is for many people time spent alone. My body of work is concerned with an individual's experience within the confines of the home, where the exterior (physical space) becomes a reflection of the individual's interior experience.