The physical and material inclusion of hair in art is a contemporary phenomenon and tests the boundaries of traditional art, the real hair in an art piece is an intrusion of reality into what is more comfortably viewed as a discrete art object. The inclusion of hair recalls human presence, social interactions, and physical mortality (Klayman 1998). Perhaps no contemporary black artist is…
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The Audacity of Place and the Limits of Self-Representation
This short paper is a measurable attempt to mediate the real and perceived gaps that locate Africa based artists to the peripheries. It asks where the opportunity for self-representation are, and looks at the engaged strategies of interpretative recovery that have the potential to demystify and delineate the zones of enunciation that are usually so fraught with gross misreading’s. In…
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Krisp 2012: Group exhibition of emerging artists
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Sta-Soft-Fro
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Artifice
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Alienation in the work of Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta
ABSTRACT: ART FROM THE TOWNSHIP When investigating art from the sociological point of view it is clear that we deal with several sets of interdependencies simultaneously, there is the interrelationship between the individual artist and his art, the interrelationship between the artist and his society and culture. Since these two sets of interrelationships are not mutually exclusive, they also exist…
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Cruel Implements
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The Dread
The fantasy of longer, thicker, more luxurious hair plays on the idea that an exponential increase in hair will automatically result in an exponential increase in beauty. This black Rapunzel’s dreadlocks threaten to engulf and consume everything in their path, they are in control of her and seek to psychologically dominate all those attracted to them…
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Hair is where the story is
Sound abstracts from a series of powerful and moving conversations with friends and relatives on the subject of hair and the subjectivities it presents or belies. The conversations weave the intangible stories of self and personhood that sometimes manifest themselves in the adoption of particular hairstyles and modes of dress and how these come to represent how we wish to…
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Expandable Black Bodies
In the search for contemporary black female identity the concern with being physically and sexually attractive is a useful site at which to examine the emergence of femininity and the numerous possibilities it opens up for the re-articulation of new identities through the practices of artifice. In a time where images of race and representation have become a contemporary obsession, hair, seemingly the most superficial part of the human body remains an object of intense elaboration and preoccupation in many societies. Hair is a multivalent, deeply symbolic material that is employable as a metaphor for broader societal issues. The physical and material inclusion of hair in art is a contemporary…