Bird Bone Whistler by Doris Bloom

You're invited to indulge in this sound-infused, multi-media exhibition by Doris Bloom.

The work explores the places we inhabit and the social and material facets that occupy our world and minds today. These actions link and embody elements of our perception. The exhibition is comprised of 15 large paintings, a series of copper etching monotype prints, soundscapes, and video-recorded performances.

Doris Bloom, raised in South Africa, lives and works in Denmark. She has a degree in ceramics from the Johannesburg Art College and a Masters from the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen. Her practice explores movement, tracing and mapping the visceral discourse of body, language, and memory, that intersects boundaries between biology and technology often adapted in collaborative performance. 

View the online catalogue here 

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The Empire Exhibition: Johannesburg, 1936

The 1936 Empire Exhibition was the first representative exhibition to be held outside the UK, and the first international exhibition ever staged in SA.

It was considered a monument to the progressiveness and prosperity of South Africa. It was held on what is now the University of the Witwatersrand’s West Campus and was an important part of Wits’ history. The show was a triumphant spectacle aimed at promoting Johannesburg and the Union of South Africa, established in 1910, but the political policies of segregation and discrimination along racial lines were underway.

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The Origin of the World

The Origin of the World: Creation and Transformation in San dress, narrative, and rock art’ by Vibeke Viestad

There was a time when animals were humans, and humans were animal. The time of the Early Race, the time of the First Big Bushman,  the time of the Gemsbok people…

One of the many misconceptions about the San is that they were practically naked when they lived as hunter-gatherers. However, ways of dressing the body in clothing, beadwork, bags fragrance, colour, and tattoos formed an important part of San cultural practice. This exhibition looks at the traces of this in the clothing itself, in San storytelling, and in the rock art produced in the past. Dress and personal ornamentation often play essential parts in the stories – as elements of creation ad transformation.  This is a story of the Origin of the world. Told through ways of dressing the body.

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Mental Wellness Walkabout: Finding Calm with Food

This month’s museum walkabout is with neurologist and brain health specialist, Dr Kirti Ranchod.

This month’s museum walkabout with neurologist and brain health specialist, Dr Kirti Ranchod, will focus on the healing power of food and will discuss neuroscience, health benefits and offer practical strategies to help you. This series of events focuses on Investing in our Cultural Capital for Better Brain Health and explores what we have within our traditions and cultures to support brain health and mental wellness.

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Public Lecture: Indigenous Traditional Fashion?

Indigenous Traditional Fashion? Documenting Endangered Leather Technologies of the Kalahari’ by Dr Chris Wingfield

Two hundred years ago, nearly all clothing worn across the Kalahari was made from animals, using locally available materials and indigenous technologies. As southern Africa has been steadily integrated into the fashion regimes of the wider Atlantic world, the economic value of these older practices has steadily declined. This talk will consider this wider history before describing a project that set out to document existing skills of leather production across four locations in Botswana as a way to understand the technologies, skills and forms of knowledge underpinning historic forms of fashion and dress that are preserved in museum collections around the world.

Chris Wingfield is an Associate Professor in the Arts of Africa at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia in the UK. Born in Johannesburg, he was educated in the UK and has worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in Cambridge. Chris is also an Associate Researcher at UCT’s Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, where he held an NRF-DST Fellowship in 2017.

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Re-weaving m/other’ by Bev Butkow

Networks of care will converge and entangle at the Origins Centre during Johannesburg-based artist Bev Butkow’s upcoming solo exhibition.

Networks of care will converge and entangle at the Origins Centre, Wits University, during Johannesburg-based artist Bev Butkow’s upcoming solo exhibition, which will run from 20 August until 30 September 2023. These networks of care raise questions around collective knowledge, co-existence, materiality, excess, the body, women’s labour, and the traces one leaves on the world. The works are the result of Butkow’s collaborative, embodied approach to studio activities. Working synchronistically with her materials – dressmaking scraps, artificial pearls, beads, textile offcuts, plastic jewels and other mass-produced, synthetic items – Butkow forms abstracted woven, stitched, printed, painted and mixed media works. The works are the result of an intuitive and habitual process of weaving, painting, layering, entangling, collapsing, and reconstructing, all of which centre the artist-woman body as a vital site of sedimented, tacit knowledge.

Save the Dates! There will be a number of gatherings and panel discussions around the broad theme of women’s work as artistic practice:
- ‘The Body and Art’ – 30 August, 4-6pm
- ‘A laterial uprising’ – 6 September, 4-6pm
- ‘The value of women’s labour’ – 12 September, 4-6pm
- ‘Traces we leave upon the Earth’ – 14 September, 4-6pm

The exhibition opening is free, entrance to the exhibition thereafter is R60/R30, tickets will be available on webtickets.
Enquiries or RSVP: tammy.hodgskiss@wits.ac.za

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Public Lecture by Prof Lyn Wadley

"Barefoot in the kitchen: cooking and sharing food in the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa" by Professor Lyn Wadley

Join archaeologist Professor Lyn Wadley for a public lecture and viewing of 200,000 year old evidence of cooked food, from the important archaeological site of Border Cave.

Cooking food in the past was dependent on the ability to make fire at will. Our Middle Stone Age (MSA) Homo sapiens ancestors seem to have been capable of creating fire from scratch, perhaps by striking rocks to create sparks. Many archaeological sites have evidence for domestic hearths with burned bone, but remains of cooked plant food are rare in the deep past. Burnt rhizomes/corms dating close to 200,000 years ago were found at Border Cave, and Klasies also yielded evidence for cooked starchy food in the MSA. The transport of raw foods to a home base for cooking demonstrates that people who lived in the MSA shared resources and took care of the aged and young members of the group that were not easily able to feed themselves.

Prof Wadley is an Professor Emeritus in the Evolutionary Studies Institute, at Wits. Her research focuses is the southern African Stone Age, specializing in Middle Stone Age cognitive archaeology. She has directed multiple excavations around the country, including the important archaeological sites of Sibudu Rock Shelter and Border Cave and Rose Cottage Cave. She is an A1-rated NRF researcher, a Fellow of the British Academy, and is listed on the Tomson Reuters list of the top 1% of researchers globally.

Sponsored by GENUS.
Tickets on Webtickets or at the door. R30 for students and Wits staff, R60 for adults and pensioners.

Enquiries: +117174700; bookings.origins@wits.ac.za; tammy.hodgskiss@wits.ac.za

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The Origin of the World: Creation and Transformation in San dress, narrative and rock art

We invite you to join us for the opening of a new, temporary exhibition at the Origins Centre, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

There was a time when animals were human, and humans were animal. The time of the Early Race, the time of the First Big Bushman, the time of the Gemsbok People…

In San myth and folklore, we learn about this time, when identities were blurred and relationships between powerful beings of a different nature were social and interacting. After the creation of the Second Order, when animals became animal and humans became human, hunter-gatherers still needed to negotiate these relationships, so that the world as we know it today would not revert into ambiguity and chaos. To dress appropriately was one effective means to do this.

The exhibition aims to disseminate the rich material and embodied culture of San dress practices, and how these made explicit part of a complex cultural discourse encompassing all aspects of life – in myth, ritual, and everyday practice. By fore-fronting a part of San history and culture that is rarely in focus, the exhibition revolves around main features of San dress from a historical hunter-gatherer context - Skin clothing (the apron, the kaross), bags, scarifications and tattoos, beadwork, bhoes, and tortoise shell containers with fragrant buchu - exploring these elements of dress and ornamentation as they appear in the ethnographic material, in San narratives and in the rock art.

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Stones and Bones: Archaeology Activity Day

Prof Pierre-Jean Texier and Dr Aurore Val for a morning of archaeology-inspired activities and explorations.

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Exhibition: "Afterisms"

Catch the last day of the exhibition by Lucelle Bernadette Pillay on Saturday, 14 October 2023.

Afterisms: Excentric Data-Fluid Narratives interrogates the notion of Indian South African Identity formations. It evokes reflections on fragmented histories, divided geographies and the psychological trauma of ‘difference’. Afterisms contemplates the ‘aftermath’ of postcolonial and post-apartheid identities with beautiful visuals, artworks and projections. 

Tickets at the door. Enquiries: bookings.origins@wits.ac.za; 0117174700.

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Mental Health Walkabout

This walkabout is part of a series with this one focussing on "Finding Calm with Silence"

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Free Theatre Performance

Join the KwaSha! Theatre company at Origins Centre for a free performance of Skin We Are In.

Enquiries and RSVPS: tammy.hodgskiss@wits.ac.za. 

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An Expedition/Exhibition with Wits Choir and Origins Centre

An Expedition/Exhibition with Wits Choir and Origins Centre taking place on 24 November 2023.

An Expedition/Exhibition with Wits Choir and Origins Centre celebrates this iconic choir’s final concert of 2023. This event on 24 November at Origins Centre will take a different route. In collaboration with Origins Centre, it will be both a choir concert and a tour of the museum. The Choir will perform songs befitting the different exhibition areas in the museum celebrating our ancestry and our communal humanity. They will also collaborate with an electronic composer who uses ‘The singing rocks’ in the centre as sound samples. The audience can expect a multi-sensory experience with beautiful singing, informative input from the guides and audio-visual footage. It is an event that alumni and fans will not want to miss.

Click here to purchase your ticket.

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Mental Wellness Walkabout: Finding Calm with Spirituality

Join neurologist and brain health specialist Dr Kirti Ranchod for the last walkabout for 2023.

Join neurologist and brain health specialist Dr Kirti Ranchod for the last walkabout for 2023. Understanding spirit and spirituality. We will consider the role of certain spiritual practices to support better mental health, exploring the past, present and future.

This walkabout is part of a series of monthly walkabout 'Investing in our Cultural Capital for Better Brain Health' that focuses on what we have within our traditions and cultures to support brain health and mental wellness. 

Tickets on sales (R60/R30). Enquiries: Tammy.hodgskiss@wits.ac.za

Click here to purchase ticket.

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An Expedition/Exhibition with Wits Choir and Origins Centre

An Expedition/Exhibition with Wits Choir and Origins Centre taking place on 25 November 2023.

An Expedition/Exhibition with Wits Choir and Origins Centre celebrates this iconic choir’s final concert of 2023. This event on 25 November at Origins Centre will take a different route. In collaboration with Origins Centre, it will be both a choir concert and a tour of the museum. The Choir will perform songs befitting the different exhibition areas in the museum celebrating our ancestry and our communal humanity. They will also collaborate with an electronic composer who uses ‘The singing rocks’ in the centre as sound samples. The audience can expect a multi-sensory experience with beautiful singing, informative input from the guides and audio-visual footage. It is an event that alumni and fans will not want to miss.

Click here to purchase your ticket.

Add event to calendar

An Expedition/Exhibition with Wits Choir and Origins Centre

An Expedition/Exhibition with Wits Choir and Origins Centre taking place on 25 November 2023.

An Expedition/Exhibition with Wits Choir and Origins Centre celebrates this iconic choir’s final concert of 2023. This event on 25 November at Origins Centre will take a different route. In collaboration with Origins Centre, it will be both a choir concert and a tour of the museum. The Choir will perform songs befitting the different exhibition areas in the museum celebrating our ancestry and our communal humanity. They will also collaborate with an electronic composer who uses ‘The singing rocks’ in the centre as sound samples. The audience can expect a multi-sensory experience with beautiful singing, informative input from the guides and audio-visual footage. It is an event that alumni and fans will not want to miss.

Click here to purchase your ticket.

Add event to calendar