Kamyar Bineshtarigh
Kamyar Bineshtarigh was born in 1996 in Semnan, Iran. He lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa and graduated from Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2019 where he won the Ruth Prowse prize for the best body of practical work. His work has been featured in a number of group exhibitions in Cape Town, including Shaping Things at SMAC Gallery and STILL at Everard Read Gallery. Bineshtarigh’s debut solo cubicle exhibition, Pilgrim, opened at Everard Read/Circa Gallery (Cape Town) in 2019. In 2018, he was awarded the VAA award by ARP Residency, which led to his video work Shelter being screened at the Corto Lovere film festival in Lovere, Italy. Bineshtarigh is currently studying at Michaelis School of Fine Art (UCT)
An Exhaustive Catalogue of Texts Dealing with the Orient (Series). Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Bineshtarigh works in a variety of media, most notably painting and video. His conceptual concerns range from language, communication and the practice of writing and transliteration to the movement, migration and displacement of human bodies. Many of his paintings feature aspects of Farsi script and calligraphy, these textual elements often either broken up into pieces or pared down to a single painterly gesture, drawing parallels between pages of text and groups of bodies through repetitive mark-making.
Pilgrims, Still. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
His video works straddle the distinctions between cinema, documentary and video art. In his videos, he utilises cinematic techniques in order to poetically convey themes of displacement, conversely drawing on his own experiences of moving from Iran to South Africa in the depiction of his subjects.
Untitled (Ghazal No. 420). Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Lerato Maduna
“[Lerato] Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.” (Walker, 1983)
Lerato Moloi aka Maduna was born and raised in Soweto, Johannesburg and is currently based in Cape Town. A mother and sister, Maduna is enrolled in the MFA programme at Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT. She has a BTech in Photography and Diploma in Television and Film Studies from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). She is also an alumni of the Market Photo Workshop. For over a decade Maduna has worked as a photojournalist and documentary photographer for a broad range of print publications and online platforms and has worked as a creative researcher in the film industry.
Cissie Gool House. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Maduna’s work and being has somehow always been focused on the notion of home or the making of home amongst the displaced, which she has always considered herself to be: displaced. At times, for Maduna this has meant finding home and community in music. Whatever images she has created says a lot about who she is or has been and becoming, even though the images might be of other reflections outside of her subjective position.
Maduna’s MFA research project works with her family’s visual archive, specifically photographs made in the 1940s to 1990s, presenting four generations of matriarchs. Using the tactile (or haptic) object of photographs, the research grapples with questions around memory, rituals, re-membering forgotten histories/herstories and private narratives versus popular public histories, all in the context of apartheid South Africa and the subsequent years. By way of interdisciplinary practices, the research investigates ways of refiguring these “matriarchives” (Phalafala, 2020), by searching in my/“our mother’s gardens” (Walker, 1983) all this in order to reimagine the future by creating new “biomythographies” (Lorde, 1993).
Omakhelwane. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Maduna will produce new visual work, which centres these inherited archival documents, each packed with lasting personal and cultural significance.
Red 4 live. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Riason Naidoo
Born in Chatsworth, outside Durban, Naidoo is a curator, researcher, filmmaker and artist.
He is curating a public art project entitled neuf 3 involving African artists that will take place in Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis in 2021. In 2016 Naidoo curated the public art project Any Given Sunday in Cape Town. He curated A Portrait of South Africa: George Hallett, Peter Clarke and Gerard Sekoto (2013) in Paris. While director of the South African National Gallery (2009-2015) Naidoo curated the blockbuster exhibition 1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective (2010). He was co-curator of the 10th edition of Dak’art in Senegal (2012), the biennale of contemporary African art. Naidoo curated exhibitions at the Bamako Encounters photo biennale in Mali (2019 & 2005). He curated exhibitions on Cape Town artist Peter Clarke presented in Paris (2013), London (2013) and Dakar (2012); on Durban photographer Ranjith Kally shown in Cape Town (2011), Reunion Island (2007), Barcelona (2006), Vienna (2006), Bamako (2005), Durban (2004) and Johannesburg (2004).
Naidoo curated The Indian in Drum magazine in the 1950s photo exhibition (2006) from the Drum magazine archives that toured venues in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town between 2006 and 2011; he published the book by the same name in 2008 (Cape Town: Bell-Roberts Publishing).
Inspired by the Drum exhibition and book he co-produced and co-directed, with Damon Heatlie, the documentary Legends of the Casbah (2016) shown at the 33rd Durban International Film Festival and in Paris, Gothenburg, New York, Dubai, et al.
Select artworks from his solo exhibition Bridging the Gap (1997)—held at the Kwazulu Natal Society of the Arts Gallery in Durban—are in the collections of the Durban Art Gallery, University of KwaZulu-Natal, the Pretoria Art Museum et al.
Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (1996) and Master of Arts (2008) both in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand, Naidoo is currently engaged in doctoral research in Art History (University of Cape Town).
Naidoo regularly writes on modern and contemporary African art for publications in Johannesburg, Paris, and New York.
Skylar Whittle
Skylar completed her undergraduate degree in Art History and Sociology at the University of Cape Town in 2020 and is currently a BA(Honours) Art Historical Studies student at Michaelis School of Fine Art.
With a particular focus on Contemporary African Art and the African Diaspora, her work and research focuses on interrogating the role of curators, art historians, artists and museums from the continent on the reception and theoretical background of art from Africa – understanding its history, looking at it in its current form, and how we can reimagine the future of African art and artists within international art relations.
She aims to continue her studies through these areas to contribute more thoroughly and meaningfully to the topic itself and the further understanding of the role of art from Africa to wider audiences.
Tayler Friar
Tayler Ava Friar is an art historian and international communications consultant with a passion for storytelling.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies from Spelman College and a Master of Science in International Development from University College London. Her career began in tech communication, one of her roles being editor-in-chief of “Women in Technology” initiatives at Google. Since leaving the US in 2013, she has been living abroad across Europe, Asia, and now Africa.
Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel. Still photo taken from FOOTPRINTS, a short film produced by ART|unknown.
in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Courtesy of the artist.
Tayler is a remote professional, and a fan of slow travel, preferring to live in a place for 3 months or more at a time before moving. She has traveled to 35+ countries.
For the last five years, she has been a communications officer at the World Bank, first supporting their Innovation Labs in Washington DC and Tokyo, and later leading communications in the Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience practice. Recognizing the emerging use of art in the development agenda, Ms. Friar served as communications lead for a 500+ person summit in Bridgetown, Barbados, where she did her first curatorial collaboration with the University of the West Indies. This opening exhibition was attended by the Hon. Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley.
She has recently transitioned jobs during the pandemic and now serves as Communications Advisor at the United Nations Development Programme. Additionally, she is a newly appointed contributing writer at Business Insider and founder of ART|unknown. - a platform that explores the intersection of the art, black avant-garde and travel in the African Diaspora.
Murals of Guadalupe. Photo taken from FOOTPRINTS, a short film produced by ART|unknown. in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Courtesy of the artist.
Ms. Friar previously served as a lecturer and is in the final year of her PhD program in Art History at the University of Cape Town. Her thesis is entitled “Black sexual politics and the erotic: The intersection of gender politics and sexuality in contemporary visual art in Africa” which will be partially published this year with Aix-Marseille University in Provence, France.
Her interests include the politics of visual culture, womxn leadership, the decolonization of art, and climate action. At the university, her most recent lecture series was entitled “Art, Theory, and Society” which focused on various histories of representation of the black female form from The Belle Époque to contemporary contexts. Ms. Friar has been recently been tapped to host a series of episodes as part of the FUTURE OF WOMEN podcast which will focus on the landscape of African art, sex and academia. Finally, Ms. Friar can be seen as a feature in Vogue Magazine’s November 2020 issue, speaking to the importance of black voices in the 2020 US elections.
Instituto Allende. Still photo taken from FOOTPRINTS, a short film produced by ART|unknown. in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Courtesy of the artist.
In her spare time, she can be found in that cafe you never noticed, practicing kizomba, painting, or working on her yoga postures. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa but is proudly from Oakland, California.
Frida Robles
Frida Robles is a Mexican artist, curator and researcher. She holds a bachelor’s degree in History from the Iberoamericana University in Mexico City and a Master’s degree in Social Design from the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
She situates her artistic practice within the philosophy of the essay with a focus on site-specificity, which has varied from public art installations to performances to textual work.
Since 2014 she has participated in different artistic residencies in the USA, Portugal, Germany, Austria, India, Senegal and Sweden. She has collaborated as a co-teacher, co-curator and co-editor with [applied] Foreign Affairs since 2017. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Art History Department at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (with support from the JUMEX Contemporary Art Foundation) which focuses on contemporary performance art from Southern Africa.
Robles research interest focuses on contemporary artists from Southern Africa who make use of performance art practice as a space to (re)fabricate and (re)connect with their own personal and social pasts resorting to the use of fables, storytelling, myth-making and ancestry recollection.
It is important to note that these artistic proposals are commentaries to deeply abused societies.
Robles ventures to say that a re-enchantment of the world would allow for a spiritual and magical narration of the self. This research intends to think of performance artistic practice as a means to activate the possibly dormant magical character of our past and time-thinking. Furthermore, this inquiry addresses the fact that these artists are challenging notions of historicity and ancestry.
Is it possible that a narrative of the self constructed from ancestry would jeopardize current and traditional (Western) notions of historiography? How are the findings of speculative fiction by —theoreticians such as Saidiya Hartman — informing performance art and vice versa? Is there really a space for political emancipation or agency by the embodiment, re-formulation and appropriation of narratives of time and the self? Which spirits, ghosts, fables and myths can be invoked and activated through aesthetics inquiries? Are the selected artists interested in what I would like to frame as a “healing of history?”.