Andrew Orkin - This residency, based in the Music Department, was a collaboration with 4th year composition students. Out of the residency came new work titled |:cycles:|, a kinetic and sonic roadmap of concurrent movement through Johannesburg using found-sound and musical loops heard simultaneously in surround-sound via twelve cassette decks. The resulting soundscape was a painting of our separate, yet homogenous experience of Johannesburg. The presentation of |:cycles:|took place on 17 November 2021 in our new music venue, the Chris Seabrooke Hall with all the covid protocols observed.
Ana Maria Baquero Tibocha (Crila Regina) - This residency was an exchange with the City of Bogota’s Plataforma Bogota (a Digital Creative program focus in the City of Bogota’s Id Artes arts and culture program). The residency with Crila Regina was an exchange aimed at bridging the digital creative divide between African and South American young digital artists.
Annette Arlander - The work undertaken during the residency formed a crucial start to the project focused on meetings with trees and the work is presented and discussed in detail in a book and online publication called “Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees in Johannesburg with environs” published by ARA. Most of the video material created is published on the Research Catalogue, an open-access international database for artistic research https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/761326/800342
Elisabeth Efua Sutherland / Fakugesi residency - The intention with the project was to co-create a digital storytelling exhibition - meaning I tapped into the knowledge and expertise of the four Griots and the graphic artist. The Griots then would help me to map stories and storytelling traditions from the North, South, East, and West of the continent into an online platform. This entrusting of the process into the hands of my collaborators meant that the work was taken step by step and generated in a very organic way, and that the project became something with its own legs and hands and being. A guiding idea was to try to record a sort of cosmography of belief around the concepts of time, earth, and death - which in themselves transcribe and round off human ideas of life or the experience of life.
(PI – Brett Pyper) – Cosmology was conceived by ARA Principal Investigator, Prof Brett Pyper, as an action research project and artists' residency featuring leading anthropologist of sound, Steven Feld and colleagues from Ghana, The Anyaa Arts Quartet, comprising sculptor, community arts archivist, and activist, musician and instrument inventor Nii Noi Nortey, master percussionist and bass player Nii Otoo Annan, and Amsterdam-based flutist Alex Coke. The musical focus of the residency was to establish a proverbial pan-African call and response between Johannesburg and Accra by exploring how jazz has articulated notions of cosmopolitanism in the two African cities and beyond.
Hilaire Balu Kuyangiko (Anciens Dieux, Nouvelle ?nigmes Old Gods, New Enigmas) – This residency brought the young Congolese sculptor from the Lumbumbashi WAZA arts centre, Kuyangiko, together with students from the History of Art department’s postgraduate programme in Curating Exhibitions: Politics of Display. The students were given responsibility for developing a public exhibition out of the Congolese artist’s engagements with selected works from the W.F. Burton collection of the Wits Art Museum.
Russel Hlongwane Fak’ugesi residency - Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud arose from the research project, Vernacular Algorithms, which sought to use the age old practice of bead-working as a basis to situate computation, mathematics and coded practice within indigenous cultures of Southern Africa. The Vernacular Algorithms project provided a framework to merge modern technology and indigenous forms of technology. Ifu Elimnyama, is an extension transmedia project to converge a set of disparate yet complimentary ideas. Hlongwane participated in both the Chale Wote festival of street art in Ghana and then at the Fak’ugesi festival of Digital Innovation in South Africa at Wits.
Atul Bhalla (India) in Fine Arts/Watershed Conference – This was a collaboration between WSOA Fine Arts Department and the “Watershed: Art, Science and Elemental Politics” Conference held at Wits University from September 10 to 21. Bhalla developed a major installation for the Conference entitled Looking for Lost Water (Explorations at the Cradle) using photographs and video with sculptural and textual interventions and performances. The installation was situated at the heart of the Engineering Campus, exposing both art students and engineering students to a profound artistic meditation on water rights, inequality, and the environmental consequences of gold mining by a major artist from the global South.
Kathleen Tagg (USA) in Music/WAM - This first ARA residency was a highly innovative collaboration between the pianist, composer, and experimental South African/American musician Kathleen Tagg, the Wits Art Museum, and the WSOA Music Department. The one-month residency culminated with a public performance of musical works composed and performed by 4th year Music composition students in response to works in the Beyond the Readymade exhibition in WAM. The music students performed, together with Kathleen Tagg, to a packed audiecne in the WAM foyer on 6 September 2018. The performance was followed by a guided tour of the WAM exhibition, Beyond the Readymade, curated by Dr Alison Kearney, which had inspired the Music students’ opuses.
