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Post-colonial Botswana is analysed in this body of work as an anecdote. Its landscapes, history, culture, traditions, norms and identity are deconstructed and reconstituted in a heterotopia of my own making. Motivated by the decline in the momentum and visibility of Botswana's women's movements, the project asks how non-male resistance and self-determination has and can operate in Botswana, particularly in traditional and cultural spaces. In this work, I identify storytelling and folklore as a device that though culturally-specific, is reflected across nations on the continent, and so, allows a meditation on personal and national identity that is not restrictive or isolating as it must occur in constant reference to the culture(s) around it. Through my own works and the works of Thebe Phetogo, Meleko Mokgosi, Athi Patra-Ruga and Kudzanai Chuirai, I discuss the ‘making visual' of oral and folklore culture to highlight the interconnectedness of African narratives and oral storytelling/performing practices while deconstructing Botswana's conceptual basis, which this work sees as being folklore itself.

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 abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-75). / In 2010, the Negative Alphabet was devised by an advertising agency as a brainstorming tool for new logos and cartoon mascots. After the Language Saturation Shift of the 2030's, when the traditional alphabet could no longer support the density of meaning packed into each word, these symbols were adopted to allow for a greater range of nuance to be presented within and alongside our positive sentences. (Brian McMullen, 2004:190)

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 bibliographical references.