Published 13 December 2022 in News from Javett-UP
As 2022 draws to a close, the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett- UP) looks back at an impactful year, highlighting connections, intersections, and creative diversity. Throughout the year, Javett-UP welcomed over 33 0000 visitors who engaged with our various exhibitions, public programmes, educational activities, and high-end private events. The Centre saw various interventions and activities that drew artists, activists, audiences, scholars, students, learners and myriad contact zones together at the heart of art in Tshwane for critical multi-disciplinary interactions and dialogues.
The 2023 programme builds on the substantial depth achieved in 2022, and locates a sharper focus on pan-African artistic education in partnership with both local and continental platforms and forums, bridging the knowledge divide through hybrid channels.
Through this programme, Javett-UP aims to mediate the transdisciplinary nature of connecting science and art to cultivate innovative ways of responding and contributing to our collective sustainable development goals and agendas. The conversations around cultural heritage continue, with the programme designed to explore new ways of bridging indigenous knowledge with academic research to cultivate new ideas and ways of doing.
“Our 2023 programme emphasises pan-African artistic education in partnership with both local and continental platforms and forums, bridging the knowledge divide through hybrid channels. We will advocate art as a source of healing that our society is in dire need of, and we will create and promote a marketplace for the commercial and wellness value of the artistic experience and creative products to contribute to the growth of the creative economy and cultural tourism of our City of Tshwane.
We send out our humble appreciation to all of you who graced us with your presence at the Art Centre, and your valued contributions and support to our programmes and operations. We are looking forward to welcoming you again together with your friends and family in the coming year” notes Javett-UP CEO Lekgetho Makola.
Javett-UP 2023 Programme Highlights
SELECTED WORKS FROM THE BONGI DHLOMO COLLECTION
Date: 23 January 2023 - 12 March 2023
The Bongi Dhlomo Collection features artworks dating from the 1960s to 1990s featuring some of the most important Black South African artists of this historical period. The Collection was collected from 2017 to 2020 by artist, curator and cultural activist Bongi Dhlomo on behalf of the Javett Foundation and features a unique and educational assemblage of over 100 twentieth-century artworks. The diverse collection provides an aesthetic glimpse into the personal and collective experiences of South Africans during the tumultuous twentieth century.
Through the exhibition, Javett-UP sheds light on the continuous need to establish de-colonial dialogues that respond to the present while considering the historical and future implications of our political and social actions. In doing so, Javett-UP aims to impact historical and contemporary notions of ‘care’, inter-dependency, diversity and inclusivity.
PLANT LABORATORY
Interactive Research Process
Date: 31 January 2023 - 2 April 2023
Initiated under the Javett-UP’s experimental research platform, Laboratory of Ideas, the Plant Laboratory takes the idea of creative research further by thinking through an edible indigenous plant garden that explores plants original to our region. The garden installation is a starting point for conversations around the history of food and caring for the earth and our bodies. The project is conceived as a dynamic collaborative platform for conversations that will draw together a wide variety of artistic voices for a series of exchanges with young farmers from the region, students of agriculture, engineers, food scientists, healers, chefs, etc.
The Plant Laboratory will host a series of commissioned performative actions, participatory action research, conversations, educational workshops, film programmes, cooking sessions, and more. The programmes generated through the Plant Lab will explore what the future of being together (commoning) may potentially look like as we navigate a post-Covid-19 society and a future challenged by climate change and injustice.
COLLECTIVE STUDY (CLASS)ROOM Javett Family Collection
4 February 2023 - 28 January 2024
Centred around two works from Javett Family Collection, this is a year-long reverse curatorial process is organised as an open ‘classroom’ or a collective study. The study will engage with works by two artists; Cecil Skotnes’ Last Supper (1995) and Sam Nhlengethwa’s lithograph titled Glimpses of the ’50s and 60’s (2002/3). This project favours participatory processes that are open to the public and will engage scholars and students from various disciplines as well as learners from the Javett-UP network of schools. Artists, political scientists, theologists, philosophers and archivists will also be invited to engage with visual elements and historical implications of these works whilst co-creating visual and textual responses inspired by them.
EPISODE #1 LEFIFI TLADI
The Art of Language
18 February 2023 - 14 January 2024
Lefifi Tladi was born in 1949 and grew up in Lady Selbourne, Pretoria. In 1969 he co-founded the jazz band, Malombo Jazz Messengers which later changed its name to Dashiki Malopo, which was heavily influenced by the trance-inducing music of the BaPedi which later influenced his approach to poetry and visual arts. Over the years he has experimented with a variety of materials and concepts and has developed a philosophical understanding of language, visual symbols and sonic consciousness. His multidisciplinary approach is aimed at elevating human perception with several bodies of work engaging with deeper understanding of the senses from a vernacular perspective.
The Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, in conversation with Lefifi, members of his family and collaborators, is proposing a long-term conservation, curatorial and educational engagement with his five-decade long life’s work. Though largely retrospective and restorative, these engagements also consider the present and future aspirations of Lefifi’s work and its impact on a younger generation. These engagements will be episodic in nature and will stretch over a period of five years.
The episodes are namely: The Art of Language (2023), Sonic Art (2024), Abstraction (2025), Collaborations (2025), and a large-scale retrospective exhibition of Lefifi’s works (2026-2027).
Episode 1: The Art Of Language
This first episode is dedicated to critically engaging Lefifi Tladi’s long-standing relationship and commitment to language as a cultural capital and his desire to communicate through poetry, the spoken word, letter writing and drawing. The Art of Language episode is divided into three sub episodes; The Museum of Letters, Palindrome Drawings and Proverbs and Poetry and Calligraphy.
ARTOLOGY
SELECTED WORKS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA MUSEUM COLLECTION
19 April 2023 - 13 July 2023
Curator: Lelani|
Co-Curated: Gerard de Kamper
Art Conservator: Sandra Markgraaf
Project Coordinated by UP Museums
Artology is an exhibition in collaboration with the University of Pretoria Museums (UP Museums).
‘Artology’ as a term is innovatively conceptualised by the UP Museums and is defined as, ‘The study of art or an object as art. A branch of knowledge or learning strategy applied to curatorship in a university museum context, including practical and theoretical perspectives. A variety of responses and methods to art-making, physical or visceral experiences.’ The UP Museums have an extensive and iconic collection of 20 th and 21 st -century South African artworks collected by the University of Pretoria over 100 years. Featuring more than 50 artworks from the collection, the exhibition reflects on the institution’s 100-year-long history of collecting, which first began in 1922.
The works in Artology showcase art by South African artists working in the past century, and further explore complex histories depicting both past and present narratives that have been developing over time and space. Artology highlights processes of university-based museum curation, collecting, research, archiving and conservation. Artology is suggestive of overlooked gaps in these processes as a commentary on prolonged collecting and institutional legacies, and questions the universities’ past and present histories. By exhibiting iconic works from the Museums, Artology explores the University of Pretoria’s permanent collections, and how this history of collecting speaks to the present.
ANOTHER ROADMAP AFRICA CLUSTER (ARAC)
28 March 2024 - 22 October 2024
The Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) is a group of scholars and practitioners of artistic and cultural education who operate in both formal and informal contexts across the African continent and the diaspora. Since 2015 ARAC has been collaborating to pursue a joint programme of research into arts and educational practices in their respective localities. The group research processes are critically informed and grounded in historical analysis, particularly with respect to Africa’s colonial heritage. ARAC is committed to building a shared knowledge experience based system and a structure of mutual learning that will benefit arts educational workers in Africa.
ARAC is a “cluster project” of the Another Roadmap School, which is a self-organised network of scholars and practitioners of artistic and cultural education based in 24+ cities worldwide. For the Javett-UP iteration of the project ARAC will work with the ‘Schoolbook Project’, which aims to make accessible the work that ARAC has done and produced since 2015. ARAC currently consists of working groups working from Cairo, Johannesburg, Kampala, Kinshasa, Lagos, Lubumbashi, Maseru and Nyanza. During their 8-month residency at Javett-UP, ARAC will produce five “exercise books” focusing on PROVOCATIONS, EXERCISES, GLOSSARY, IMAGES and AUDIO-VISUAL collections.
FREQUENCIES
6 May 2023 - 18 February 2024
FREQUENCIES is a long-term project developed by the artist Oscar Murillo with members of his family, studio team, and collaborators around the world. Initiated in 2013, the project has collaborated with over 300 schools in more than 30 countries, creating dialogues and archives by documenting the social and cultural differences through the learner’s works. Frequencies’ intention is to reach a larger audience through Murillo’s creative explorations on how to communicate and engage with the public to bring a better understanding of art-focused education. As part of the Frequencies project in South Africa, canvas sheets were affixed to desks in schools located around Gauteng. Students were invited to freely express themselves, draw and write on the canvasses for a period of six months, after which the canvasses were collected to form part of Frequencies of
In addition to the canvases from schools in Pretoria and Johannesburg, the exhibition will also focus on canvases from the Frequencies project that took place in Zambia, Kenya, Senegal, Ghana, Egypt, Morocco, Chile, Mexico and Brazil.
ART BANK SOUTH AFRICA
16 September 2023 - 28 January 2024
First launched on 12 December 2017, The Artbank of South Africa (ArtbankSA) is a national programme of the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture (DSAC) and is hosted by the National Museum Bloemfontein, an agency of the Department of Sport, Art and Culture. The ArtbankSA is tasked with purchasing works from South African artists, particularly that of emerging artists to lease and sell the artworks to South African government departments, private companies and private individuals.
Sharing a passion for showcasing artworks by both established and emerging South African artists, the Javett-UP, in collaboration with ArtbankSA will be showcasing works from the ArtbankSA’s collection.
About The Javett Art Centre at the University of
Pretoria
The Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP) is a partnership between the University of Pretoria (UP) and the Javett Foundation (JF). All share a firm belief in the emancipatory potential of the arts in society through multidisciplinary curatorial and pedagogic initiatives. It is a project that is collegiate as it is philanthropic. With one foot firmly rooted in academia, and the other embedded in the public, Javett-UP critically responds to histories of Africa's creative outputs and the future aspirations of the continent and the diaspora. Central to Javett-UP is our commitment to continuous de-colonial dialogues that respond to the present whilst considering the historical and the future implications of our political and social actions. Javett-UP is committed to sustained critical enquiries where activities of writers, artists, researchers, advocacy groups, historians, politicians, farmers, scientists, musicians, and others can intersect. The Javett-UP Bridge Gallery is a symbolic architectural feature connecting the university and its surrounding communities. The Bridge Gallery ensures easy access to all members of the university community including students, maintenance, administration, academic and support staff.