stop and think befor u toss that next filter...

decon >> EyE CAnDy >

wishin all a simple new Year>> simply simplify

price hikes. BUY ART

Filling in the Gaps

So we all got stuck on the island on Friday afternoon after our last session. We happily packed and got ourselves and big luggage to the harbour for the staff ferry back to the mainland at 3:45pm, only to find out that all the tourise boats to the island have been canceled due to rough sea conditions - which meant that angry Robben Island Museum staff and a very tense group of curators had to wait a long time for one boat to make the trip several times to get home.

A couple of very tense hours followed, getting people off the island to catch busses, planes, loved ones, jobs etc on the other side. We were too late for some (Angie and Motseokae missed their bus to Bloemfontein and spent the night sleeping over) and others made it in time (the Joburg flight was substantially delayed, thankfully).

I am in the process now of reconciling everything - including accounts, my professional life, documentation etc. and making sense of the past two weeks. Hopefully others will contribute to the blog once the dust has settled and help make sense of the experience.

Till next time,

Storm

back on the main land...

the last few minutes felt really weird, ``the want`` for getting home was like
no other,A Rough sea and the tummy ``upside down u turn me``
feeling was lekker KAK ...

reflections of the two weeks on Dat - island "try this ""

Week Two Day Four: Lovely lovely people

Today everyone got stuck in their proposals again. They are taking it so seriously. I am impressed. I am also slightly worried. Had an intense day again, packed with detailed presentations on fundraising and marketing in the morning. After lunch we set a task which required everyone to write a proper proper proposal, with budget and powerpoint presentation - and about five hours to complete it in. It kind of put a damper on the farewell braai that is currently still underway. Music blaring, quiet island life temporarily disrupted.

Last night Abdul showed a very violent Japanese film - set on an island, 8 km in circumference. The same size as Robben Island. In the film 30 school kids have to kill each other for a single one to survive. For a moment we thought it almost an apt metaphor for the curators workshop... in the cutthroat contemporary art world, with 14 emerging curators in the same small space... cooped up for two weeks...

On a serious note, the two presentations todat were quite informative. Joseph Gaylard had some memorable quips about funding and fundraising. Did you know, that the per capita government spend on arts and culture in Mpumalanga in 2005 was an astronomical 3c, compared to R34 in the Western Cape?

Deborah Weber came in to deliver an impressive presentation on corporate sponsorships and marketing, and provided tools for bridging the gap between contemporary visual arts practice and leveraging corporate support. She also explained how to quantify Returns on Investment (ROI), and a number of good tips on accesing oppertunities within marketing and social investment budgets.

Tomorrow morning everyone will present their final proposals, and they seem very nervous about it. Virginia MacKenny said on Tuesday that we are too kind on people...

Ps. No blogging by bloggers. Useless.

Week Two Day Two: Bloggers on Strike

We just finished the second day of the second week - its ten at night - with an intense group conversation on relationships with artists. A subject that we have somehow not given any attention to during the past ten days. Quite ironically I think.

Some hillarious anecdotes surfaced - and some tragic ones. Yvette spoke about the difficulty of working with artists with no physical addresses nor telephone numbers and Andrew once desperately bartered artwork for a curated show with a sixpack of beers.

Before supper a decidedly unbalanced game of soccer was played with kids on the island. Big curators pushed small children around on the field, but they got their asses kicked by the motley crew of little ones. Cindy got whacked on the ear. Its still red and half the size of her head. Storm had a beer and occasionally shrieked half heartedly "go team, go team". Joseph permanently damaged his inner thighs.

The formal sessions were fun too. Everyone had to present their projects after yesterdays proposal writing exercise. Some intense feedback ensued - the thread throughout the day were the brutal honesty with which everyone critiqued each others work.

Stacy Hardy presented an intense paper on education processes - which were really interesting and off the wall. She packed in concepts and ideas, peppered with really interesting obsevations and appropriate expletives. Its great hearing such strong convictions and opinions being expressed - on a subject, education, that is usually tacked on most art projects as an afterthought. She urged the enthralled audience to think about educational possibilities at the inception of their projects.

Brendon Bell-Roberts, a very busy guy, presented on his art publishing experience. Getting him to the island proved a logistical nightmare. I will one day write a book. Urgent calls to the director of the RIM finally got access to a later ferry, as Brendon has an important meeting earlier in the day and could not rock up at 7:30 am.

Virginia MacKenny gave a well-oiled talk on basic priniciples of writing media releases and curatorial statements. A 'nuts and bolts' presentation that went down really well, with very usefull 'how to' tips. She's bright. An exercise was set late in the afternoon, and I expected a riot to errupt from a very tired and exhausted group. Only Rita stormed out.

After a while everyone regrouped, strangely energised and all eagerly read back their five line media releases. And here came the brutally honest feedback. No one held back, nor from presenting, nor from criticising. I liked the maturity of everyone and also the honesty with which this was handled. Mavis I think, offered an interesting and rounded reading of her project.
Supper included, unusually on this particular island menu, rice and stewy stuff. I am finally gaining weight, after 34 years of unsuccesfull dieting.

Ps. The documenting teams are useless. They have not blogged a single line for two days. Only Abdul, but he's blogbefok.

look who i found, At LOLAS

lolas is a spot that many frequent, even Carol, Storm And Giovanni
oh, if u in da streets of cape town get a copy of the BIG issue( its only 12 RANDS), there is a spread of us on da island...

The force of images The power of words

im a visual creature and this is what i captured for the first week, it was really
awesome to interact with some of the headz that make art history.

Heads first

to blog may be a new experience, which sounds to the unititiated among us (myslef included - like a bad case of constipation), however we may have to wait for the real thing of initimidating physical meetings to establish content, but i do think this a most fabulous oportunity these next 10 days to throw ourselves into an uninhbited space of learning. So i look forward to it, put your best foets forwARD.
from
sarie

by way of introduction...

I am intrigued and would like to know a little bit about the rest of the group but many of you do not seem to have written or posted a profile. Come on... let's. It will satisfy the psuedo-psychic-latent detective in me - if nothing else.
See you all on Monday if we do not meet online before then.
Regards,
Beathur

Edits, chocolate and mozzies

It seems that I thought that I had much more time on my hands to get nicely prepared for this workshop, and now that Monday the 20th is around the corner, I remain puzzled as to why I have not edited the photography that I would like to show, or done at the very least a rough selection of work for one of the projects that I am working on. Perhaps this will be one of the outcomes of the workshop. I am looking forward to teasing out some ideas, filling the questions with more questions, and thinking in a less isolated and less perochial manner. I will make a concerted effort to not make you all trawl through thousands of images and get a decent selection prepared before Monday. I was pleased that the one of projects that I am working on , of Eli Weinberg's lesser known, if not entirely unknown photographs is something that has been thought about by his surviving grandson, and I really hope that I will have a collaboration to speak about at the workshop. Well perhaps the rough edits are not ready but I do have other things thought through, like some bars of really nice chocolate packed to go. Wondering if there is too much wind on Robben Island for mozzies, and if this is a good time to give up smoking ( again !) Will there be loads of time to read, should I pack that tome that sits untouched at my bedside ?

The Confirmed Participants

EMERGING CURATORS: Cindy Poole (Cape Town), Sarie Potter (Cape Town), Loyiso Qanya (Cape Town), Kudzanai Chiurai (Zimbabwe/ JHB), Ijeoma Uche-Okeke (Nigeria / Jhb), Rita Potenza (JHB), Amos Letsoalo (JHB), Fatima Maal (JHB), Ernett Nkwana (Limpopo), Beathur Baker (JHB), Yvette Dunn (Durban), Motseokae Klas Thibeletsa (Taba Nchu), Angela de Jesus (Bloemfontein)

ESTABLISHED CURATORS: Gabi Ngcobo (Cape Town), Sylvie Groschatau-Phillips (Cape Town), Andrew Lamprecht (Cape Town), Sipho Mdanda (Tshwane), Bret Pyper (JHB), Monna Mokoena (JHB), Christopher du Preez (PE), Nonto Ntombela (Durban), Carol Brown (Durban), Thivynaidoo Perumal Naiken (Mauritius)

INTERNATIONAL CURATORS: Eddie Chambers (UK), Bisi Silva (Nigeria), Giovanni Carmine (Switzerland), N'Gone Fall (Senegal)

KEYNOTE GUESTS: Clive Kellner (JHB), Zayd Minty (Cape Town), Khwezi Gule (JHB), Emma Bedford (Cape Town)

FACILITATION: Joseph Gaylard (JHB), Storm Janse van Rensburg (Cape Town)

Countdown to Curators Workshop

The Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA) and Robben Island Museum proudly presents a Curators Workshop from November 20 until December 1, 2006 on Robben Island, Cape Town.

The workshop, a first for South Africa, will bring experienced local and international contemporary art curators together with emerging South African curatorial talent. It will provide a dynamic and interactive forum in which these groups can share experience, ideas and initiate collaborative curatorial projects, with a particular focus on the opportunities and challenges facing curatorial practice in contemporary African contexts. Emphasis will also be placed on the role of the visual arts and curatorial practice in social change and activism.

VANSA is an organisation established by and for South African artists and arts practitioners to represent and lobby for the interests of all active practitioners in the South African visual arts sector. Focused largely on issues of art and social development, VANSA foregrounds existing historical imbalances and deals with concerns around access, opportunities and coherence within the visual arts sector. Formed in 2003, it is an emerging national voluntary body that is establishing a broad membership base, which includes leading figures from the visual arts community nationally.

The Curators Workshop follows a successful conference hosted and organized by VANSA earlier this year in Cape Town, which brought together artists, administrators, museums, galleries, government representatives and arts media to deliberate on the state of visual arts since South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. Delegates from all nine provinces attended.

The Curators Workshop is intended as a residency and laboratory on Robben Island. Whilst resonant with the legacies of the past, the site provides a fitting environment for contemplating the ways in which contemporary visual arts practice can play a role in shaping a robust and healthy public democratic culture.

The workshop takes place over two weeks, with the first week dedicated to presentations by 10 professional local and 4 international curators with 10 emerging curators in attendance. The second week, once professional and international curators have returned home, will be taken up by intensive workshops in curatorial practice and the shaping of future projects, with the group of emerging curators.

Local attendance to the workshop has been on application, and the deadline for proposals expired on October 1. A selection process is currently underway to establish participation. The travel, subsistence and participation costs of participants are fully subsidised through generous support from the project’s funders.

The international participants are Giovanni Carmine (Switzerland), Eddie Chambers (UK), Bisi Silva (Nigeria/UK) and N’Goné Fall (Senegal/France).

The Curators Workshop is generously funded by the National Arts Council of South Africa, The Arts & Culture Trust, ProHelvetia, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the British Council, the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and the French Embassy.

Also see www.vansa.co.za for more information.


ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL CURATORS:

GIOVANNI CARMINE (SWITZERLAND) is a curator, writer and critic based in Switzerland. In 2004 he initiated Zimmerfrei, a non-profit project dedicated to contemporary art and visual culture located in the South of Switzerland, a “very nice place, but an unfertile land for contemporary art”. He has written for numerous contemporary art magazines such as Flash Art International, Parkett, Kuns-Bulletin, Juliet, Frieze and others. He contributed to a number of books and exhibition catalogues, including “Bunker: Unloaded – Coming Up For Air” and “Ryan Gander: In a Language you don’t understand”. His curatorial work is wide and varied, and includes exhibitions for Art Athina (Greece), the Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, Photocairo 3 (Egypt), the 6th Cairo Biennale (Egypt) and Kunstraum Walcheturm (Switzerland) amongst others. He was recently appointed as director of the Neue Kuns Halle St.Gallen, a museum of contemporary art in Switzerland.

EDDIE CHAMBERS (UK) is a curator and a writer of art criticism. He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College for his thesis researching press and public responses to Black visual arts practice in England in the 1980s. He has curated a large number of exhibitions in Britain and abroad. In 1989 he established the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive, a Black artists' research and reference facility, co-ordinating the project for several years until the autumn of 1992. Living in Bristol, England, he continues to research visual arts activity, curate exhibitions and write on various aspects of visual arts practice. For the spring and fall semesters of 2003, he was Visiting Professor in the Art History Department of Emory University, Atlanta, teaching classes and seminars on the work of artists of the African Diaspora. He has returned to Emory University to teach for three semesters during the course of 2005 and 2006.

N’GONÉ FALL is a Senegalese contemporary art critic, curator, publisher and consultant in cultural policies. Fall has written extensively on contemporary African art and as editor with the Paris based published Revue Noire, co-edited the seminal book “An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth Century” (2002) with Jean Loup Pivin. She also contributed to “An Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography, published by Revue Noire Editions. Fall has curated numerous shows in Europe and the continent, and was an invited curator for the 2002 Dakar Biennial. As a consultant she is the author of strategic plans, identification programs and reports on cultural events and structures for institutions such as the Ministry of Culture of Senegal, the City of Paris, Arts International in the US, Code Africa in Switzerland and the Prince Claus Fund in The Netherlands. Fall is a founding member of the Dakar based collective Gaw, an organisation focussing on visual arts and technology. She is also an advisory board member of “Res Artis”, a worldwide network of residency programmes, based in Amsterdam. Fall lives between Paris and Dakar.

BISI SILVA is an independent curator and critic based in Lagos, Nigeria. She is currently working on the forthcoming inaugural exhibition on contemporary African Art for the National Museum of Mali in Bamako in 2007. She was a co-curator for the Dakar Biennale (May/June 2006). Among her exhibitions are HairDaze: The Cultural Politics of Black (1999), Heads of State: Faisal Abdu’Allah (1997/98), 4 degrees in the Open (1996). She writes for ThisDay Newspaper in Lagos and has written extensively for international art magazines and journals such as Art Monthly, Creative Camera, Third Text, Nka, Journal of Contemporary African Art. She is on the editorial board of N Paradoxa, an international feminist art journal. She has an MA in Curating and Commissioning of Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art London.

ENDS.

MORE INFORMATION:
FACILITATOR: Storm Janse van Rensburg
CONTACT: CELL: 083-287-6856 EMAIL: storms@polka.co.za
VANSA GENERAL SECRETARY: Joseph Gaylard
CONTACT: CELL: 082-598-4107 EMAIL: coelacanth@iafrica.com