Announcements
Dr Nicola Cloete
Dr Nicola Cloete is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures at the University of the Witwatersrand. Cloete’s research areas include Slavery in South Africa, Gender Studies, Memory Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, Visual Studies, and Postcolonialism. Her recent research examines the memory politics in representations of slavery in post-Apartheid South Africa.
Recent publications include: Nicola Cloete (2021) Digestible Memories in South Africa’s Recent Past: processing the Slave Lodge Museum and the Memorial to the Enslaved, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 27:12, 1230-1244, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2021.1950030 for which she was awarded the 2022 Zumkehr Prize for Scholarship in Public Memory
Dr Kitso Lelliot
Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s practice moves between video installation, film and writing. She is interested in the way the world looks when seen through differing knowledge systems, conceptions of time, [hi]story and their making of the present. Her practice is a process of searching for surfacing [hi]stories that have been elided and, through them, an altered more livable present. The idea of the real becomes a contested space when enunciations from spaces beyond dominant knowledge systems trouble the real of the hegemony. She is broadly interested in radicalised hierarchy as it is tied to hierarchies of knowledge, considering how these took form across the Atlantic world during the formative episode that shaped the modern age.
She works from the perspectives of historically subjugated subjectivities, privileging South-South engagements that are in relation to yet imaginatively and epistemologically unmediated by the Global North. In 2017 Lelliott was laureate of the Iwalewahaus art award and was a featured guest artist at The Flaherty Seminar 2018. In 2019 she won the NIHSS award for best visual arts. She was an artist in residence with the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2019. From 2018 to 2022 she was a postdoctoral fellow and artist in residence with the Centre for Humanities Research at the UWC.
Nontobeko Ntombela
Nontobeko Ntombela's research area focuses largely on South African modern and contemporary art with a particular interest in early modern Black women artists. A large part of Ntombela’s career has been working as a curator, producing exhibitions across South Africa and abroad including the recent exhibition When Rain Clouds Gather: Black South African Women Artists, 1940 – 2000 (2022-2023), co-curated with Dr Portia Malatjie. at Norval Foundation Cape Town.
She has worked as a curator at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2010-2020), Durban University Art Gallery (2005-2010), BAT Centre (2001-2005), and Art for Humanity (2000-2001), where she produced numerous exhibitions.
She has also served in different capacities on several boards and committees for organisations such as the Department of Art and Culture, VANSA Visual Arts Network of South Africa, National Arts Council, KZNSA KwaZulu Natal Society of Arts, Art for Human Rights Trust, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and UNISA Art Gallery.
Prof Brett Pyper
Brett Pyper is a South African arts, culture and heritage practitioner with over thirty years’ experience advancing and studying the country’s cultural-democratic transition. He grew up between Johannesburg and Pretoria/Tshwane, where his background as a classical musician informed his efforts to open up programming at the former performing arts councils as a young arts organiser. In the early 1990s, he arranged the first post-exile performances in Tshwane by returning jazz icons as well as showcasing the work of an emerging generation of musicians. He also worked with singer-songwriters, choirs, Afrikaans counter-cultural artists and colleagues in related performance disciplines including dance and theatre. Based on this work, as a Fulbright scholar, he earned Master’s degrees from Emory University in Atlanta (in Interdisciplinary Studies) and New York University, where he earned his PhD on contemporary jazz culture in South Africa in 2014. He has taught arts, culture and heritage policy and management as well as ethnomusicology and popular music studies at Wits and Rhodes Universities. From 2008 to 2013 he was CEO of the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK), a major festival of art, popular and vernacular culture. He recently completed an 8-year term as Head of the Wits School of Arts, where he pursues ongoing research alongside his leadership responsibilities and supervises postgraduate work in music, theatre, dance, heritage and cultural policy. He regularly serves as a mentor for The Festival Academy, having co-hosted Atelier Johannesburg in 2018 – the first on the African continent. As a researcher, he is the principal investigator for the Arts Research Africa project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which advances artistic research across all disciplines housed in the Wits School of Arts, prioritizing decolonial perspectives from the global South.
He is the research cluster leader of the National Institute for the Humanities & Social Science’s South African BRICS Think Tank on Arts, Culture & Heritage And/As Knowledge Production, and co-directs the Re-centring AfroAsia project.
Boitumelo Tlhoaele
Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures, department welcomes Boitumelo Tlhoaele, who officially joined the department on the 1st of August 2021. She joins as an Associate Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand and when asked what it means for her to join the department, she replied “I am excited, it feels like I have come full circle. First, being a master’s student there and now coming back to teach. I look forward to being part of a robust, creative, and intellectually stimulating Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures department.” Boitumelo is a Doctoral Fellow at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (Stellenbosch University) working on the Hidden Years archive project. She is also an independent curator and a former journalist. Her research interests are exploring the intersections between jazz and art, the music and visual archives within the context of curatorial engagements and practices. She holds an MA in Heritage Studies (University of the Witwatersrand). She has curated a number of exhibitions including Leeto: A Sam Nhlengethwa Print Retrospective(2019). She is a board member of the Association for Visual Arts and The Meta Foundation.
Sinethemba Twalo
Sinethemba Twalo is a practitioner based in Johannesburg, South Africa. They are a founding member of NGO- NOTHING GETS ORGANISED. Sinethemba was a 2014 Humanities fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Twalo has contributed and/ or presented work in various platforms including the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), The 2018 Taktlos Free Jazz festival in Zurich, the 3rd Black History Month Florence (2018), the 32nd Sao Paulo Bienal public programme (2016) and the 8th Jerusalem Show (2016) amongst others. They recently co-curated Interfacing New Heavens (2021), with artists-in-labs (ZHdK), at the Javett Art Center at the University of Pretoria. Sinethemba is a research associate in the Research Chair in Critical Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Pretoria, working on the project 1985! People's Parks, Sites of Struggle and the Politics of Plants. Twalo is a graduate of the MAPS programme at the Ecole Cantonale d’art du Valais in Sierre, Switzerland. They are a PhD candidate in Art History at the SARCHI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg.
Greer Valley
Greer Valley is a lecturer in Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures at the Wits School Arts, University of the Witwatersrand. She is a doctoral candidate in Art Historical Studies at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and a Doctoral Fellow at the Archive and Public Culture Initiative at the University of Cape Town. She currently serves on the board of the Africa South Arts Initiative and as a member of council of the Kwa-Zulu Natal Society of Arts. In 2019/20 Greer was selected as a Getty Foundation MAHASSA (Modern Art Histories in and Across Africa, South and Southeast Asia) participant and she formed part of the Dak’art Biennale 2020 selection committee. Her current research and practice interests include curatorial interventions in museums and art institutions connected to South African colonial histories. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture (B-Arch), Honours degree in Visual Studies and Masters degree in Visual Art.