Bruce Murray Arnott: Into the Megatext
Editors: Mari Lecanides-Arnott and Sven Christian
.ruce Murray Arnott: Into the Megatext provides the first comprehensive overview of one of South Africa’s most significant sculptors. His influence as an artist, scholar, designer, curator, and educator runs deep; intuited through the work of many of South Africa’s leading contemporary scholars and practitioners in the visual arts. Through an intrinsic understanding of the human condition, and the balancing of the intellect with creative endeavour, Arnott bridges continents, space, and time. This is reflected in the monumental scope of references embedded in his work, and in his view that "All sculptures are 'points of entry' into the great sculptural megatext." Similarly inspired by history, mythology, npsychology, philosophy, education, ecology, and sustainable design, this publication serves as one such point of entry. It includes contributions by a range of authors who delve into different aspects of Arnott’s life’s work; a selection of Arnott’s own writings, chosen to represent the breadth and depth of his oeuvre; a chronological catalogue of Arnott’s sculptures from 1961 to 2018; and a visual timeline that contextualises his long and multi-faceted career.
Jackson Hlungwani
Authors/editors: Elizabeth Burroughs, Nessa Leibhammer, Karel Nel, Vonani Bila, Ashraf Jamal, Amos Letsoalo, Mbhanyele Jameson Maluleke and Raita Steyn
Publishers: Villa Trust, Norval Foundation & Merensky Trust
Jackson Hlungwani is one of the most important South African sculptors to have emerged in the 1980s. He worked at Mbhokota, a remote rural village in Limpopo Province where, on a hilltop site, he created a sacred body of work. His sculptures manifest a complex synthesis of Tsonga-Shangaan beliefs fused with his own personalised interpretation of the Christian faith. At some point in the past, this hilltop supported an Iron Age settlement and Hlungwani may have purposefully located his sacred site at this place of African heritage. His sphere of influence began with adherents from the community around him, and expanded to national recognition once his sculptures were exhibited in major South African art centres. His reputation eventually extended internationally as his works were shown in galleries and institutions in Japan, Britain and Germany.
Hlungwani’s body of sculpture articulates his spiritual journey, his insights, and his world in three-dimensional form aiding him in his life’s mission as orator, teacher, healer, and visionary. The sculptures are evidence not only of a remarkable sustained artistic endeavour, but are also, by nature, sculptures that teach. Hlungwani created specific works for the two altars on the hilltop site that he called ‘New Jerusalem.’ These sculptures – as well as many others – expressed his immanent relationship with God, Christ and the Archangels Gabriel and Michael. His numinous world was then directed to his community in his teachings, and beyond, as he freely shared his vision of a new world order. The publication explores the possible connection between Hlungwani’s work and early African Christianity established in Axum from the 4th century C.E., as well as the possible diffusion of religious thought down the eastern side of the continent. The influence on Hlungwani’s thought and work of an African-based Christianity, introduced into southern Africa by the Ethiopian Christian Church and the American Zionists, intimates the broad sources of his vision for an African Christianity – one that would create a New World of peace and harmony. Many of his key works are reproduced and discussed in the book, sharing his idiosyncratic ideas, helping the reader to grasp the stature of the sculptor who created this range of poetic and awe-inspiring creations.
Re/discovery and Memory: The Works of Kumalo, Legae, Nitegeka & Villa
Editors: Elizabeth Burroughs and Karel Nel
Publisher: Norval Foundation
Re/discovery and Memory included major retrospectives of the work of both Sydney Kumalo and Ezrom Legae, shown alongside an exhibition of their friend and colleague Edoardo Villa. The Kumalo and Legae retrospectives, the first to be undertaken by any institution globally, brought together a considerable body of work: a series of bronzes and drawings chronicling their innovative artistic practices. The Villa exhibition focused on the work he produced in the period of 1958-68 and centred around his monumental sculpture ‘Africa’ (1958).
Strange Cargo: Essays on Art
Author: Ashraf Jamal
Editor: Sven Christian
Strange Cargo: Essays on Art is a collection of forty essays by Ashraf Jamal. It can be regarded as the twin of Jamal’s previous book, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art (2017). Both form part of a single venture to celebrate and entrench the rich complexity of South African artists in a global imaginary. The artists that Jamal chooses to reflect upon refuse to fit into a predictive algorithm. He has written with equal intensity about artists old and young, dead or alive, famous or relatively unknown, black or white, trending or not. Love and empathy—his indifference to difference—is his engine room, and much like the artists featured, Jamal does not only write for the moment we are in, but for a readership to come.
Villa at 90
Editor: Karel Nel
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Edoardo Villa is one of South Africa's most respected sculptors. His creativity has been characterised by a disciplined work ethic encapsulated in his phrase, 'to work is to live'. At the age of 90 he still added monumental pieces to his prodigious body of work. The title, conceived as a tribute to coincide with Villa's 90th birthday, is a document of his sculptural development over six decades. The essays offer insights into how Villa forged a unique and productive oeuvre from the European and African sculptural influences which converged in both his life and his work. This title, with its generous array of pictures and careful analysis, will help ensure that his remarkable work becomes more widely known, both nationally and internationally.