This dissertation explores the major themes of Irma Stern's (1894-1966) representation of the black figurative subject in her African periods: Swaziland, Zanzibar and Congo (1922-1955). Germane to these periods are Stern's childhood experience in the Transvaal and her training and influences in Germany. My research aims to do the following: (1) address a gap in the current literature on Irma Stern and her African periods (2) to consider whether Stern's mature periods, Zanzibar and Congo reveal an imaginary 'primitivist' mode of representation. Central to my research is the question of Stern's identity as a woman, settler and Jew, as it is critical to exploring the relation between Stern as a white settler and that of her black figurative subjects as viewed through the discourse of 'primitivism'. My methodology involves drawing from various archives, primary and secondary literature on Stern and Stern's own writings. My visual methodology includes a comparative analysis of Stern's early paintings in relation to her influences and formal and iconographic analysis of select 'mature' paintings.

Includes bibliographical references. / The title of this dissertation is An Archaeology of Self. The first two chapters explore the historical and theoretical basis that has informed my creative work. It is predominantly concerned with artists who engage with the everyday in their art-making. The three main ideas elaborated upon in the body of the text are; the notion of mark making and trace as able to invoke the corporeal presence of the artists; the inclusion of quotidian objects and routines as subject matter within art that recontextualises them as worthy of attention; and the extent to which the representation or use of material objects, traces and leavings can retain significant meaning. The latter is explored in reference to artists who use an archaeological methodology in their work. An underlying theme in both practical and theoretical research is the concept of indexical trace that invokes the presence of its referent while paradoxically signalling its absence. The concluding chapters deal with my methodology and the processes of collection used in arriving at the works presented for examination.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 88-93). / I have produced a series of sculpted cast figures in the medium of cowhide as part of my Masters degree. This document, titled Locating Me in Order to See You, serves as an explication of the practical component. Initially I examine the broad context in which my sculpture has been produced, and that in which it will be presented and likely to be received. In attempting to position myself within Contemporary Art discourse, I have specifically considered how Contemporary Art from Africa is often read and comprehended by both those producing work on the continent and the Diaspora, and those interpreting, critiquing, collecting and marketing it, mainly in the West. The basic premise for this is a discussion of the inescapable labels of Black Artist and Black Art and what they imply within the context of Contemporary Art discourse with reference to Africa and more specifically, South Africa. As an emerging Contemporary African Artist I am faced with confronting some of the stereotypes and assumptions associated with art and artists of the continent and! or the legacy of the Apartheid regime.

Includes bibliographical references. / I was born in Cape Town, South Africa around the tumultuous time of the Soweto uprisings of 1976. The first few years of my life were spent living with relatives and friends of my mother in Langa while she worked in the city in various households as a domestic worker. Her occupation took her away for long periods of time. By the age of two my mother and I moved to Woodstock where we lived with a family that consisted of five adults, who each had children of their own all under one small roof. The house was always full of people.

Includes bibliographical references. / Why do skin, hair and fingernails that are desirable objects, belonging to a whole body and adding to its decoration, cause disgust and become markers of mortality when they are no longer part of the living body? When disembodied and separated into single strands, skin cells and nail clippings they repulse. In this project, by reconsidering, altering and curating dust, I produce artworks that allow for a new construction of its meaning. Extracted from my living spaces, the dust consists of fragments of objects that were once useful and contributed to a daily existence. In the form of household dust, they become useless. Through the creation of art objects I rework this substance so that it regains purpose. I view my body as a device for producing art, an instrument for construction as well as a producer of my chosen materials. I consider dust through the lens of various dualities: attraction and repulsion, fragility and strength, public and private, clean and dirty, order and chaos and presence and absence. As in all dualities, the potency of the one cannot fully function without the contrast of the other. Through the subtle altering of this non-matter (the dust), I have produced mark-making instruments, made use of it as props to aid performances and mediated its form through video pieces and photography. These products are an experiment in creating something from the non-thing. The material’s original use value is lost in its state as dust, rendering it without purpose - a found material that is always lost.

Includes bibliographical references. / How, and in what ways, might a visually - and artistically - inclined person gain knowledge from a body of ethnographic photographic objects? I approach this question by launching an inquiry into the Balobedu of Limpopo province, South Africa as masters of myth - making, the 1930s anthropologists as masters of perception and myth transmission, the camera as a mechanical tool that has no master and the photographic image and object as a slippery abstract, or thing, that resists taming. What binds Balobedu, anthropologists and photography in this relationship is their collaboration at particular points in time in the production of the knowledge that is now Khelobedu. Khelobedu refers to all knowledge, custom, practices and culture emanating from Bolobedu and its people. To do this, I assume, or play with, the character of ' motshwara marapo ' (keeper of the bones or master of ceremonies), a versed person who officiates in ceremonies involving multiple custodies, doing so by reciting stories and enacting activities that facilitate progress within ceremonies and rituals. My engagement explores the process of pacifying a disavowed ethnographic archive using the performative aspect of the photographic object's materiality with the aim of gaining knowledge of the indigenous and colonial, using concepts with origins in both categories

Includes bibliographical references (p. 82-86). / In this project the idealised body of Venus represents an uncomfortable whole. She symbolises the richly divergent, contrasting, and often thematic concerns of female beauty that my, work has attempted to represent. She signifies arid originates the centuries of fluctuating meaning and contesting truths about women and the way in which they are represented that are at the centre of my research - in an image that resists resolution. As the title of the body of practical work implies, Venus Revisited points to a journey of return. It refers to a recurrence of ideas about the idealised female body informed by its origins in Greek myth. Venus still informs current Western visual culture - the female body remains 'the map on which we mark our meanings' (Mullins, 1985: 331).

Revisiting the future re-examines some ideas of the Italian Futurist painters Boccioni, Balla, Carra, Russolo and Severini. These ideas included multiplied sensations and states of mind, interpenetration and superimposition, lines of force, and placing the spectator at the center of the painting. These ideas are then examined in relation to the senses and to contemporary art practice. I present ideas on how images for the various senses can operate both individually and collectively to create interactive, multi-sensory communication surfaces. The works I produced are my response to the challenges posed to painting and artistic practice by the sensorium and the Futurist painters' ideas.

Includes bibliographical references. / This project is an investigation of a community of cartes de visite. Cartes de visiteare 10,5cm high by 6,5cm wide cards, which have extremely detailed portraits of individuals, captured in an intimate moment to document who they were. It is an excavation of the carte de visiteas object and its materiality, as a collection, as a fragment which captures the sentimentality of people who have outlived their portraits. The carte de visite is a piece of photo history, an autobiographical trace, a social phenomenon of the past and present. This body of work is a result of a personal process and psychoanalytical challenge to overcome loss.

In this research I consider ways in which black South African artists working during and after apartheid have both revised and symbolically redeployed the Stations of the Cross - and more broadly, the iconographic tradition of the Passion cycle. In so doing, I demonstrate the strategic application of Christ's episodic sufferings as a means of both analogously chronicling situations of historical trauma, as well as articulating more aspirant narratives of political resistance, selfliberation and reconciliation. Concentrating initially on church-commissioned projects realised in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I trace the reinterpretation (or 'Africanisation') of the Stations of the Cross by artists such as Bernard Gcwensa, Ruben Xulu and Sydney Kumalo. Noting the emergence of a black Christ and a localised Passion, I emphasise the complex cultural and political implications of this iconographic transformation - arguing that its hybrid realisation undermined the cultural bias of a European-styled Christianity, and the racial hierarchies of colonialism and apartheid. Following this, considered in more detail are the secular reimaginings of Sokhaya Charles Nkosi's Crucifixion (1976) and Azaria Mbatha's Stations of the Cross for Africa (1995) - as series wherein the episodes of Christ's Passion are consciously and symbolically redeployed. In the case of Nkosi's Crucifixion, I show as covertly documented in a black Christ's sufferings the incarceration and torture of political activists in apartheid South Africa. On a more ideological level, I demonstrate also, as embodied in the series, the aspirant directives of Black Consciousness and Black Theology. Turning to Mbatha's Stations of the Cross for Africa, I present its visual narrative as analogously envisioning, as well as critically rethinking, the mutually embedded traumas of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Significant to my analysis is the future vision of reconciliation posited by Mbatha, and the extent to which it both reflects and challenges that maintained within the 'transformative' programme of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Demonstrated in my evaluation of these appropriative projects is the way in which a traditionally European iconographic tradition is critically redeployed - in chronicling situations of historical trauma, as well as in the envisioning of alternative futures. As such, I hope to afford a more nuanced and challenging appreciation of these reimagined Passion narratives, as significant projects of cultural and postcolonial memory. In keeping with this, I advance in conclusion a 'rethinking of pilgrimage'. Recalling the culture of participative witness associated with devotional programmes like the Stations of the Cross, I propose that in the case of both Nkosi's Crucifixion and Mbatha's Stations of the Cross for Africa, extended to viewers is a certain imperative: to imaginatively revisit, and rethink within the present, traumatic histories of black suffering and resistance.