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COUNTER // NARRATIVES
VIDEO ARTWORKS
A collection of video artworks created by
artists interpreting, engaging and
re-imaging first-generation academics'
life experiences within universities in
South Africa, India, Syria and Zimbabwe.
I Walk Where I Like
‘I walk where I like’ visualises a process of marginal wondering and wandering. Recounting a specific period of transformative seeking, dream and awakening in the life of a senior academic, footage of rural southern Africa straddles roadsides, paths and demarcated tarmac.
Two Things Can Be True
Made in 2019, after three years of ongoing student protests across South Africa, intergenerational persepctives and questions about the foration of knowledge and human interactions are brought into proximity in this artwork.
Mgwali
In a rural Eastern Cape landscape, the rope of a silent bell “calls for the writing of history” by the “literary elders [who] live both in the world of those who have gone before and those who are not living”. Utilising sound and performance, the artist enacts the “voyaging in” of an amathwasa elder by moving through and occupying the liminal spaces and thresholds of knowledges.
Untitled
Drawing on visual associations of traditional theatre, performance and the carnivalesque, 'Untitled' offers an interpretation of starkly silent moments in the aftermath of crisis which were recounted in the story of a Syrian woman academic in exile.
Out of Order (work-in-progress)
Within the guise of a diaristic Youtube post, the artist performs the formalised conventions of aspects of the research process for this project, as she reads through portions of the invitation letter; then slips in and out of recounting and embodying selections of a participant’s transcript from a study* looking at first generation Black academic women in South Africa; before confirming her consent as the artist-researcher to participate in the project.
The Bell
‘The Bell’ is the reflective story of the education of an Angolan academic. The viewer engages with critical incidents in her life, from a young girl leaving for Cuba through to her returning engagements and identity negotiations as a refugee and a leader, as she questions the worth of her life, knowledge, and its purpose from her current perspective in senior management.
An Irreversible Other
Within this filmic artwork, transient fabric traces connect emptied university spaces with the woman academic whose familial stories include resistance to the othering they experienced as categorised members of a Scheduled Tribe in India. A dialogue is created between that postcolonial context and South Africa, with various aural and visual associations, including the bygone and current tools of surveillance, documentation and projection, and eery colonial and modernist architectural structures.
Jo Kinda People (work-in-progress)
Xolisa Ngibelanga and the children of a High School in the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa recreate their own counter narrative in response to viewing the works made by the artists partaking in this project.
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