Submission instructions:

3rd, 4th year and Honours students of the Wits Department of Fine Art are invited to submit work for selection. Collaborations and collectives are welcome. Applicants are to submit a single artwork only. Works in all media are welcome. As the WYAA 2022 exhibition will be presented in physical space and on the TPO website, performance and site-specific projects will need to be submitted with relevant documentation, in order to enable the selection and adjudication process.

Those accepted into the final curated exhibition will be expected to participate in all relevant aspects of the exhibition programme, which may include online activations, conversations and other forms of interaction.

Timeline:

• Submission dates from 18 to 21 July 2022. Submissions close at 5pm sharp.

• Announcement of finalists: 29 July

• Delivery of selected works to the point of order: 1 August (no later than 12pm)

• Curate and install exhibition: 2 to 4 August (artists should make themselves available for this process)

• Adjudication, exhibition launch and announcement of winners: 10 August

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In order to submit, please register below:

Asymptotic Convergences

I am invited to write you a text, to ask you to navigate a set of prompts and questions which illicit or arrive at an artwork as a presence of thought. As I write I wonder what a community of art students in Johannesburg may seek to produce, may be thinking to express. I wonder at the multiple subjectivities and the potential for collective memory embodied individually and collectively within the university, and this in relation to something Kodwo Eshun terms an ‘asymptotic convergence’, as “a lot of different people thinking along similar lines for different and parallel reasons” (Talking Heads, Sonsbeek: Force Time Distance (2022)).

The theory of the asymptote represents a value you may get closer and closer to but never reach; it suggests limits, intersections and meeting points, accumulations and trajectories.

How could we consider time as the unreachable value and its convergences and multiplications?

How do impressions and failures of time play out through collective memory and civil imagination?

What happens in the convergence of the things we may never reach?

Should convergences find use?

How might art making practices serve and reimagine conceptions of time through ecology, sustenance and civil imagination?

Playlist:

“Members, Don’t Git Weary” – Max Roach

Ariella Azoulay “The Civil Imagination: Introduction” pages 1 – 10

Talking Heads― Kodwo Eshun in conversation with Amal Alhaag and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

(Reference to asymptotic convergence at 00:50)