The first, “Leaving Home” by former Professor in art at the University, Mary Duker, is structured as a series of visual chapters, and is the product of a long period of practice based research. It focuses on the exploration of abandoned homes on two sites, one rural and one urban, in the Eastern Cape.
The images and videos and installations of the spectral fragments and found objects that the homemakers left behind them have been installed in a shifting and fluid assemblage that relates to the spaces in the Nelson Mandela University’s Bird Street Gallery.
The works can be read as the material evidence of the research process, and as an autoethnographic creative response to the wordless stories that both the abandoned sites and the objects narrate and demand attention to.
View the exhibition at: https://nationalartsfestival.co.za/show/leaving-home/
The Pop-up Collective is an interdisciplinary collaborative endeavour by the School of Visual and Performing Arts, Music and Visual Arts department (Faculty of Humanities, Nelson Mandela University). Curated by the Director of School, Prof Pieter Binsbergen, the exhibition/performance forms part of the Faculty of Humanities curriculum conversations colloquium titled Learning from our context: Revitalising and Decolonising the Visual and Performing arts at Nelson Mandela University.
Lecturers from both departments encouraged a collaboration between music and art students where they were tasked to respond to the theme of the colloquium. The infectious levels of creative energy gave rise to a multisensory experience offering multimodal approaches across the full spectrum of the Arts. In doing so it aimed to highlight and affirm the materialities that underpin the modes of our indigenous knowledge systems which are true to our identity of the Eastern Cape Region.
View the exhibition at: https://nationalartsfestival.co.za/show/the-pop-up-collective-exhibition/
