Thulile Gamedze reflects on the urgency of creative, transdisciplinary practices for black women in postcolonial spaces, thinking through artist, collaborator in iQhiya collective (1), and friend Sisipho Ngodwana’s work.
Author: Thuli Gamedze
The Zone of Proximal Development
South African artist and critic Thuli Gamedze and her brother Asher, researcher talk about ‘the zone of proximal development’ : how can you – with assistance – let grow, multiply, specialize and expand a basic familiar knowledge of art. They talk about the possible tools to reach that goal. “In the final section when we imagine a future world, we are grounded within rigorous self-engagement, and our engagement with other peoples’ worlds helps us to think about contradiction between everyday life and the imagined.”
African Art and Film Practices: Processes of Colonial Creative Containment
“Filmmaking arrived in Africa with the intended function of ‘civilising’ the African population. The way that they would do this was through the introduction of western norms and ideals portrayed in film, which was a simultaneous strategy of erasure and dismissal of African existence as this exotic and superstitious experience. The role of film in this sense was a way to render our own stories useless to us.”
Filmmaker Mzonke Maloney in his conversation with art critic Thuli Gamedze
Afripedia: Senegal film still Omar Victor Diop, 2014 (28-min-30-Courtesy-of-Stocktown-Films)
To Hell with Monuments
As we have seen through multiple 2015 student protests, where many of us were conscientized through mobilizing around the violence of colonial symbolism, a monument is not simply a representation- it gives strength to the static, it validates regime, and affirms its own position in an attempt to prove timelessness. While the monument still stands, so then does the status quo it holds.
Thuli Gamedze challenges colonial and other monuments.
Detail of a site specific work of Lungiswa Gqunta.
The art world in South Africa observed
Thuli Gamedze – a middle class Black person, as she calls herself – observes the art world in South Africa, specifically in Cape Town, in an attempt to reconcile personal encounters in various art spaces that seem to present multiple tensions between viewer, artist, art object, and gallery structure- due to the latter’s implied neutrality.