Chasing Shadows Meaning
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Landscapes between Then and Now
In Landscapes Between Then and Now, Nicola Brandt examines the increasingly compelling and diverse cross-disciplinary work of photographers and artists made during the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid and into the contemporary era. By examining specific artworks made in South Africa, Namibia and Angola, Brandt sheds light on established and emerging themes related to aftermath landscapes, embodied histories, (un)belonging, spirituality and memorialization. She shows how landscape and identity are mutually constituted, and profiles this process against the background of the legacy of the acutely racially divisive policies of the apartheid regime that are still reflected on the land. As a signpost throughout the book, Brandt draws on the work of the renowned South African photographer Santu Mofokeng and his critical thinking about landscape. Landscapes Between Then and Now explores how practitioners who engage with identity and their physical environment as a social product might reveal something about the complex and fractured nature of postcolonial and contemporary societies. Through diverse strategies and aesthetics, they comment on inherent structures and epistemologies of power whilst also expressing new and radical forms of self-determinism. Brandt asks why these cross-disciplinary works ranging from social documentary to experimental performance and embodied practices are critical now, and what important possibilities for social and political reflection and engagement they suggest.
Visionary Animal
An illustrated collection that takes stock of current knowledge and proposes a new way of reading indigenous art For thousands of years, nomadic hunter-gatherers assigned a fundamental role to the visualization of the animals who shared their lives. Some, such as the Cape eland, the largest of antelopes, were the object of a fascinated gaze, as though the graceful markings and shapes of their bodies were the key to secret knowledge safeguarded by the animals’ unsettling silence. Renaud Ego posits that the artists sought to steal the animals’ secret through an act of rendering visible a vitality that remained hidden beneath appearances. In this process, the San themselves became the visionary animal who, possessing the gift of making pictures, would acquire far-seeing powers. Thanks to the singular effectiveness of their visual art, they could make intellectual contact with the world in order better to think and,ultimately, to act. They gained access to the full dimension of their human condition through painting scenes that functioned like visual contracts with spiritual and ancestral powers. Their art is an act that seeks to preserve the wholeness of existence through a respect for the relationships linking all beings, both real and imaginary,who partake of it. The fundamentally ecological dimension of this message confers on San art its universality and contemporary relevance.Visionary Animal is a translation of L’Animal voyant, published in France in 2015. This rich collection of essays is beautifully illustrated with the author’s photographs of rock art from across southern Africa.
South African Cultural Studies
Author: Christopher J. Lee
language: en
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Release Date: 2025-09-16
This book offers a holistic guide as to how South African identity and culture can be understood in the past, present, and future. Drawing from the rich archive of previously published articles from the journal Safundi, South African Cultural Studies documents the mutual histories of the country and the journal over the past quarter century. Divided into six sections, the first section addresses cultural figures, including Oprah Winfrey, Trevor Noah, Olive Schreiner, and Dimitri Tsafendas - an unusual group that illustrates the unique and international character of South African culture. The second part brings attention to the important role that photography has had in depicting and narrating South African cultural life, whether through the intimacies found in recent images by Zanele Muholi or the historical work of David Goldblatt and Santu Mofokeng. The third section of the book looks at music as another idiom that has proven indispensable for South African social life with Miriam Makeba, Rodriguez, and Die Antwoord providing examples. The fourth and fifth sections of this book address sexuality and film, respectively, underscoring at once the contrasting approaches to popular culture that have surfaced in Safundi as well as their requisite abilities for grasping everyday tastes and mores. The worlds of Ms. magazine, District 9, Black Panther, and Spike Lee, to pick only several topics raised, supply ways of thinking across these chapters. The final section of the volume concludes with the role of place in the construction of culture, whether museums, national monuments, the Spur restaurant franchise, or landscapes like the Karoo. This book will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, activists and critics, as well as readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africa’s cultural history over the past century.