10:10

Photo: and Photography Education Trust hosted the first 10:10 of 2022 on 14 April.

10:10 is an invitational ice-breaker session which uses a presentation and feedback format. 7 photographers were given no more than ten minutes to present their work online, followed by 15 minutes of feedback from peers and invited responders. Invited responders were artists and lecturers Stephané Conradie and Zen Marie, along with Photo: director John Fleetwood.

Participants:

Luke & GetVulnerable (South Africa)

Arsène Mpiana (Democratic Republic of Congo)

Motlhoki Nono (South Africa)

Amine Machitouen (Morocco)

Lunathi Mngxuma (South Africa)

Remofiloe Mayisela (South Africa)

Sethembiso Zulu (South Africa)

This is the third online iteration of the 10:10 to date. As was the case at the previous 10:10, this allowed us to welcome participants and responders from across the continent at a time where the Covid-19 pandemic has made in person gatherings near impossible.

Respondents:

Stephané Edith Conradie (b. 1990 Namibia) is a lecturer in printmedia at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Although primarily a trained printmaker, she is known for her bricolage assemblages. She is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at the University of Stellenbosch, where she completed her MA in Visual Arts (Art Education) and her BA in Visual Arts (Fine Arts). Her research work focuses on trying to make sense of her social and economic ‘situatedness’, in a South African context. Her research stems from a fascination with how people categorise and arrange objects in their homes, particularly her own family members in both Namibia and South Africa. Conradie creates ornate sculptures of entangled objects, inspired by home décor found in lower and working-class homes in South Africa. Though seemingly only used for aesthetic purposes or seen as commonplace, Conradie suggests that they could provide an important lens through which to examine value placement and meaning-making. Her work examines the histories of colonialism and creolisation embedded in domestic material culture, calling into question how identity is encoded in the private domain. These objects have provided her with a language to investigate the creolised formations of identity that are linked to South Africa’s histories of colonialism, slavery, segregation and apartheid. Creolisation directs our attention towards the cultural phenomena and material culture that result from displacement and the ongoing dynamic interchange of symbols and practices, eventually leading to new forms with varying degrees of stability.

Zen Marie (b. 1980, Durban) is an artist and educator working at the intersection of lens-based media, social practice and installation. Zen holds an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and is a graduate of the two year residency program at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Through a practice which spans film, photography, performance, drawing and writing, he investigates the relationships between power and place, and medium and meaning. His current and recent projects propose decolonial rereadings of the narratives that become entangled with nature via conquest and representation. The ocean recurs in his work as a site where the personal, the political and the social are refracted through the experience of the sublime. His current research extends this interest in the politics of the sublime to landscape. Zen's studio practice is complemented by his position as a lecturer in Fine Art at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg, where he is also engaged in research towards a practice-led PhD.

John Fleetwood (b. 1970, South Africa) is a photography curator, educator and director of Photo:

 He recently curated ‘Intimacy and Resistance: An intergenerational dialogue on South African photobooks’, Photobook Week Aarhus (Denmark 2020), ‘Five Photographers: A tribute to David Goldblatt’ (South Africa, Mozambique, Mali et al. 2018-2019), ‘Of traps and tropes’ as part of Kerkennah International Photography Festival (Tunisia, 2018), Amongst other things’ (Mindelo, Cape Verde 2019). In 2017, he was guest editor for Aperture’s Platform Africa edition. From 2002-2015 Fleetwood was the director of the Market Photo Workshop. 

For more information on the 10:10 event, contact info@phototool.co.za.

Posted 12/05/2022.