WYAA'19 — the point of order

Wits Young Artist Award ‘19

Possible Pasts, Shadowy Beauties, Subversive Futurities

In her book Art on my Mind, the American theorist bell hooks (1995: 49) writes of beauty as more than just a ‘joyful thing in life’, of its subversive possibilities in sustaining life as she speaks of the work of the Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres:

“beauty is also a life force, affirming the presence of intense intimacy, closeness, our capacity to know love, face death, and live with ongoing yet reconciled grief. Unlike Keats, Gonzalez-Torres insists in his work that beauty is not best expressed or contained in the enduring art object but, rather, in the moment of experience, of human interaction, the passion of remembrance that serves as a catalyst urging on the will to create. The art object is merely a mirror, giving a glimpse that is also a shadow of what was once real, present, concrete. It is this invitation to enter a world of shadows that Gonzalez-Torres’s work extends. Shadows become the locations of our destiny, outlining the shape of past, present, and future possibility.”

Thus, according to the above, aesthetics are not in excess of a function but are intrinsic to human thought, knowledge-making and experience. They are world-making, life-affirming, always containing the possibilities of disruption and alternatives, of things that refuse and loom, calling things that are not as if they are. They hearken to histories, memories and erasures and to cycles of catastrophes past, present and future that threaten on local and human scale. In mid-2019, what does the ‘art object’ mirror of the worldscape?

The Wits Young Artist Award asks young artists to respond to the ideas contained above: the subversive potential of aesthetics; the art object as a shadow of the ‘real, present, concrete’; the enduring moment of human interaction and intimacies and how this is harnessed in art; the will to create; outlining past, present and future possibilities; visualities as disruption and as life-affirming – as us-affirming, beyond mere joy.

Curated by Sharlene Khan and Reshma Chhiba

Selectors: Nandipha Mntambo & Dylan Valley

Adjudicators: Dean Hutton, Dee Marco & Mary Sibande

Winner: Adrian Fortuin

Merit Awards: Hemali Khoosal and MAGOLIDE Collective