Making art to make identity : shifting perceptions of self amongst historically disadvantaged South African artists

This study examines how historically disadvantaged artists shift self-identities through artmaking beyond previously racialised, hierarchised and essentialist constructs in a transforming New South Africa. Fieldwork research involved direct observation, working with artists on art projects, and interviews with visual artists and other arts practitioners in Cape Town, 1998-2001. Artworks are examined as events incorporating social change, and thus as a focal point between unconscious praxis and the cognitive coming-to-awareness of self within-the-world. Using a non-essentialist approach to identity construction, I argue for an understanding of, and approach to, studying individual identity that incorporates complexity, multiplicity, materiality and change as integral to identity formation. The reworking of memory materially within artworks is demonstrated through examining how artists re-presented autobiographical and historical referents of identity to affirm and re-present new narratives of self in South Africa's present. How artists respond to, and negotiate, tensions and contradiction between concepts of 'freedom' and externally-derived categories of value within socio-economic limitations in a transforming South African art world is also explored. I also show how artworks act as sites of transcultural encounter for artists, within their awareness of different gazes and contexts of interpretation, to position identities simultaneously both within the local and beyond the local, through different images, styles, techniques and technologies in their work. Finally, I demonstrate how different collaborative art projects, through artistic praxis, enable mutual processes of social and artistic collective identification between artists of different socio-cultural backgrounds, in relation to processes of nation-building and reconciliation for South Africa in the future. The study not only provides insight into art-making in South Africa and material processes of cognitive identity construction, but also how individuals act as agents in shifting self-identities within processes of collective socio-political transformation.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Social Anthropology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Gibson, N Jade

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Frankental, Sally

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/10508

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/10508