2011-NMMU-Research-Report - Research Management - Nelson ...

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NMMU Research and Innovation Report 2011 - Faculty of Arts
The R12 million project has a R7 million value. Whilst the project
has actual outputs (the artworks installed into positions within
the inner city area) and provides an entrepreneurial avenue for
the associated artists, its underlying research focus is on the role
that public art can play in reconstructing and transforming public
expectations of the inner city (the project is part of a larger urban
regeneration plan for the inner city area).
Ms Duker would like to express her gratitude to the Mandela Bay
Development Agency Lotto Funding for inner city regeneration
related art projects.
After showing at the NMMAM Gallery the
exhibition, reconstituted in a travelling
form, was invited to the William Humphries
National Gallery, and the National Arts
Festival in Grahamstown.
Working from the basis that readings of history and the visual archive
are mutable, and are subject to a multiplicity of interpretations that
shift over time, and that the artwork (as an autonomous text into
which human discourse has been bound up into a material form
and separated from its artist-author) can be read and interpreted
by the viewer in a range of ways - each of the viewer-artists was
invited to bring an "own" interpretation and reading to the work
they selected. In the resultant exhibition, the responses and the
original works were hung together in a visual dialogue.
Re.Sponse was a critical success and it evoked a positive public reaction,
attracting a record attendance. It provoked discussion on the role of
the visual archive and the museum in a postcolonial period; on the
elevated status of work once it is received into the repository of the
visual archive; on the politics of representation; on ways that the broad
social currents of the time affect the production of and reading of visual
texts, on the way the boundaries between artist as spectator-receiver,
artist as respondent-interpreter and artist as creator had been blurred
in this exercise. After showing at the NMMAM Gallery the exhibition,
reconstituted in a travelling form, was invited to the William Humphries
National Gallery, and the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.
Her collaborators are the local MBDA Project Director, Dorelle
Sapere; and National Trinity Sessions Johannesburg based public
arts project team led by Marcus Neutsetter and Stephen Hobbs,
who operate on an international platform.
Ms Duker’s future research plans are associated project work (they
have already generated and submitted a report on the role of the
creative arts and industries as positive catalysts in urban upgrades),
with specific reference to the Bird Street Belmont Terrace precinct
in inner city Port Elizabeth, and are now engaged in the associated
roll out of public arts projects.
She highlights that “one can relate projects like this to points raised
in the recently circulated Charter for the Humanities document. The
project has pertinence in terms of the following observation that
there is a need to explore role(s) of the creative arts in society, to
acknowledge and develop the entrepreneurial potential of the
creative disciplines as part of the efforts to position the humanities in
the national debate.”
Ms Junita van Dyk
The nature of Ms Junita van Dyk’s work is immensely diverse, yet
the totality is a synthesis of practical musicianship, research, social
responsibility and pedagogy, with choral studies and performance
being its core component.
She is fortunate that her work with the NMMU Choir is recognised
by the international choral community for its unique ability to
successfully interpret both Western and African music.
One of the Spittal international judges, Robert Sund (Sweden)
referred enthusiastically to the Choir’s “sincerity…energy…and
its ability to combine singing with vigorous African dancing - and
the unusual and innovative theatrical presentation of the African
folk music.” He subsequently proposed that the NMMU Choir -
successfully - be invited to perform at the International Federation for
Choral Music Ninth World Choral Symposium in Argentina in 2011
- the highest choral accolade in the international choral arena.
While practical performance constitutes a large portion of her
work, it should be noted that a substantial amount of research
goes into the preparation of new programmes, the learning of new
repertoire, the commissioning of new South African compositions
and presenting it on the world stage.