Jenni Lauwrens

University of Pretoria | UP · Department of Visual Arts

Created for people with visual limitations, Willem Boshoff's Blind Alphabet (1990-ongoing) has already received extensive critical attention. Surprisingly, however, this literature has overlooked how those for whom the installation was created, experience and appreciate it. This article reports on a series of interviews with people who are blind or...

Editor's note: This volume presents diverse views on the nature and status of the body in relation to a variety of artforms, including music, film, advertisements, painting, video works, installations, typography, photographs and performance. My sincere thanks to all the contributors for their input and patience throughout the editorial process. I...

In 2017, while living in two geographically distant locations, South African artist Katherine Bull and French artist Emmanuel de Montbron collaborated on a project in which they used mobile phones and an online blog to share stories about their experiences of place. The end product of their collaboration is Towards Telepathy (2017), a two-channel v...

From mythology, history, and religion to contemporary popular culture, Lilith has been represented in a variety of ways. As either an avenging vampire or a seductive temptress, or a fascinating combination of both, she has been understood as both an object of a patriarchal view of women and a liberated and liberating feminist icon. The meanings tha...

The American pragmatist, Richard Shusterman, has given shape to a field of study known as somaesthetics. In his formulation of this field, Shusterman (1999:302) recommends that, in philosophical discourse and in relation to aesthetic experience, close attention should be paid to 'bodily states and experiences'. His concern is especially to place th...

Consumption and production of the arts have been a part of the human experience since the ancient period. This dichotomous process in South Africa is typically characterised by, but not limited to, socioeconomic, sociopolitical, and sociocultural classifications extending the pre-1652 era to the present. The period from 1986 to 1992, which is regar...

Another Time, Another Place is a reunion exhibition of artworks by 40 artists who graduated 30 to 36 years ago at the University of Pretoria (South Afica) during a most significant seven-year period between 1986 and 1992. Volume 2 of the exhibition catalogue consists of 20 topical essays written by a spectrum of authors. Some have direct links to t...

This essay begins by briefly reflecting on the status of landscape as the subject matter of art. The main purpose is to explore some of the different understandings and definitions of landscape in art with a specific focus on debates circulating in the 1980s and 1990s when the artists who are participating in the Another Time, Another Place exhibit...

As gevolg van die vinnige verspreiding van die nuwe koronavirus en die COVID-19-pandemie is die fisiese grense van aanraking in 2020 verskuif en aggressief in openbare ruimtes (her)polisieer. Gevolglik word "om kontak te behou" met geliefdes en kollegas toenemend deur middel van digitale tegnologieë bedryf. Deur strategiese reklameveldtogte belowe...

While there is a solid and growing literature on audiences' affective and empathie responses to visual art, visual culture, and the mass media more generally, less attention has been given to how voice might play a central role in such experiences. In this article I explore two artworks that utilised voice to solicit particular responses from their...

Touch is gaining attention in sensory studies and in art practice where the over-emphasis on sight and visuality in academic discourse is increasingly been questioned. The exhibition The Blind Astronomer (2013) by South African artist Berco Wilsenach participated in this larger critique of visuality by inviting audiences to engage with the works th...

The article explores the reciprocal relationship between images and viewers by considering the relationship between the senses of sight and touch. I argue that images touch viewers at the same time that viewers touch images. Taking Casilda Sánchez video work, As Inside as the Eye can See as a point of departure, this article explores the ways in wh...

Ecological art responds to environmental degradation and often aims to restore ecosystems through arts practice. Some ecological artists devote their practice to motivating people to protect small species, particularly by increasing awareness about the role these creatures play in local ecosystems. In this article, I discuss two South African ecolo...

In various disciplines concerned with the perception of images the embodied nature of image encounters is increasingly receiving attention. A common premise in such investigations is that people’s embodied responses to images ought to be critically investigated owing to their previous neglect in academic discourses. The under-theorised and developi...

Video games play a significant role in promulgating dualistic gender roles and prescribing sexual identities. Situated within the broad theoretical framework of postfeminism, this explorative study analyses the distinctive articulation of masculinity in the post-apocalyptic video game, The last of us (2013 Naughty Dog). While it has been argued tha...

In this article we explore the nature of a particular kind of femininity, which we term ‘Christian-Afrikaans femininity’. It is our contention that the rise of glossy magazines over the last two decades, and specifically since the fall of Apartheid in 1994, aimed particularly at Christian-Afrikaans women in South Africa, is linked to a so-called cr...

Discourses concerned with the sensorially embodied subject have emerged since the 1990s in various disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, geography, film studies and literary studies. The purpose of this article is to bring the conversation regarding audiences’ embodied engagement in culture closer to art history by investigating t...

A great deal of research in visual culture prioritises sight as the human faculty greatly in need of analysis in order to expose the ways in which seeing is constructed in and through culture. This article teases apart the reasons why seeing has enjoyed such prominence in Western science, philosophy, art history and visual culture studies. The inve...