Alison Kearney

University of Johannesburg | uj · Department of Visual Art

Hilaire Balu Kuyangiko (b1992, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is an emerging, mixed media kinois (resident of Kinshasa) artist who combines referents to contemporary global popular culture with icons from his Kongolese heritage in his artworks. In this article, I explore the meanings that emerge from Kuyangiko’s amalgamation of imagery from glob...

Contemporary South African artist Wayne Barker is well known for mixing referents taken from high art and popular culture in his art practice that spaces more than 30 years. Barker’s infamous appropriation of J. H. Pierneef’s works has been interpreted as iconoclastic acts that critique the ideals Pierneef represents. Barker’s seemingly irreverent...

Despite the persistence of poor learner performance in an inequitable schooling system in South Africa, there is a surprising lack of extensive research that examines teaching and learning practices in the classroom. Hoadley (2012), in a presentation to a Carnegie conference, based on a review of South African primary schools, highlighted the stren...

For too long the weight of educational scholarship produced in South Africa has been limited to that simple and standard form called the literature review. Now, for the first time, education researchers are provided with an African-based text on the concepts and methods of conducting systematic reviews. In this exceptional work of editorship, Felix...

The #RhodesMustFall campaign that began at the University of Cape Town in early 2015, called for the decolonisation of South African university curricula, among other transformations. As a result, many South African academics are questioning the epistemologies that underpin their disciplines. What does the decolonisation of university curricula imp...

The # RhodesMustFall campaign that began at the University of Cape Town in early 2015, called for the decolonisation of South African university curricula, among other transformations. As a result, many South African academics are questioning the epistemologies that underpin their disciplines. What does the decolonisation of university curricula im...

Alan Alborough uses industrial materials like cable ties, plastic bottles, clothes pegs and fishing gut to create intricate installations that explore art-making processes and challenge the conventions of display and spectatorship in the field of exhibition. As a result, Alborough is regarded as a leading contemporary South African conceptual artis...

Duchamp’s designation of found objects as ‘readymades’ in the early part of the twentieth century challenged the traditional status of the art object as a unique product of the artists’ manufacture, and called into question notions of art and artist’s work at the time. Roberts (2007) argues that the readymades can be thought of as acts of deskillin...

Wits art museum (WAM), as part of its mandate, aims to create and implement multiple public education programmes that allow for informative engagement with the visual arts of Africa among diverse audiences. WAM seeks to facilitate lifelong appreciation for the museum and its collection by encouraging audiences to make their own connections and mean...

The use of found objects is evident in a range of contemporary artmaking practices. The use of found objects can, however, no longer be understood as a rupture from tradition as they were in the early decades of the twentieth century when they were first used by Picasso and later by Duchamp, because found objects have become part of a longer geneal...

The use of found objects is part of contemporary art-making practices, and can no longer be understood in terms of the anti-art gestures of the first decades of the 20th century. An approach to understanding this practice, which goes beyond an interpretation of the artworks as ‘anti-art’, is needed. One such approach is to focus on the changed onto...

This study investigates the ways in which museums are understood as texts, and how artists challenge those assumptions within their work. This is achieved through an exploration of the strategies that artists use to critique art’s institutional framework and the hegemony of the museum. Through making interventions into museums, and parodying museum...