COLLABORATIONS/ARTICULATIONS

The FADA Collaborations/Articulations exhibition — curated and initiated by artist, writer, and Lecturer in the Graphic Design Department at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA), University of Johannesburg (UJ), Brenden Gray — presented new works and collaborative projects realised by creative practitioners in FADA.

In Collaborations/Articulations, Gray explored the “articulating potentials of collaboration” and the capacity of cross-disciplinary work to generate new forms of practice and reflection. Gray attempted to demonstrate how creative practices can speak to, and with, other practices in the social world, and how collaborative creative practices can generate new knowledge. Works spanned across a range of media and interdisciplinary practices, including video, sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, as well as paper-based and site-specific work. The exhibition also included open-ended textual contributions by the featured practitioners that visitors could read while engaging with their respective works. The works were generated through an intensive process of dialogue between individual practitioners and their selected collaborators over a period of a year.

The exhibition featured nine new projects:

• The Underground, the Surface and Edges: A Hauntology of Johannesburg by the curatorial, research, art, and arts writing team of Leora Farber and Anthea Buys
• Unit for Measure III by art critic Mary Corrigall, performance and installation artist Bronwyn Lace, and installation artist Vaughn Sadie
• Love Me as I Am by artists Shonisani Maphangwa and Mphopho Rangoato, and filmmaker Thenjiwe Nkosi
• The Ship Sails On by ceramicist Eugene Hön, working with members of the UJ Multimedia Department
• Spring-Cleaning: Death in Varanasi by performance artist Myer Taub, photographer and video artist Dean Hutton, and filmmaker/writer John Trengove
• Great Dodecahedron Stellation by sculptor Gordon Froud and UJ Professor Emeritus Jos Lurie
• A Study of the Vulnerable: Gyps coprotheres (Cape Vulture) by artist Rosalind Cleaver and The Ditsong Museum of Natural History, Bird Collection
• Secret/Wish by artists Landi Raubenheimer and Paul Cooper
• Paper collaborations/articulations with the Phumani Archive Mill by the Phumani Archive Mill: Kim Berman, Mandy Coppes, Nkosinathi Ndlandla, Thamsanqa Tshabalala, Dumisani Dlamini, artist and writer Brenden Gray, painter Inge Hyson, author-designer Deirdre Pretorius, and information designer Sidhika Sooklal