Anelisa Mangcu
Mangcu has worked as a concept developer and artist who divided her time between Johannesburg and Cape Town. Mangcu has managed the George Pemba Arts Foundation, consulted and collaborated on integrated brand campaigns with some of the world’s most notable brands, and inspired and enriched the lives of the youth in sharing their own narratives through visual art. Mangcu studied a BA in Creative Brand Communications specialising in Copywriting at Vega Cape Town. She is described as a multidisciplinary artist who communicates in a multi-faceted language but remains consistent to her narrative. Her work addresses intersectionality as an African, concerned with identity construction across a variety of discursive contexts. Her first photographic venture (at age 17) was a 2010 collaborative exhibition at the Exposure Gallery. Mangcu’s debut solo photographic art exhibition was titled: “The Moments Amidst the Chaos”, which ran in September of 2011.
Matthew Nissen
Nissen was born in 1986 in Cape Town. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town in 2007, majoring in history and political science. For his final research project, he looked at the relationship between teachers and students during the protests against the apartheid regime, in the 1980s, specifically in the Cape Flats. He wanted to understand the rise of consciousness and the historical timing.
In 2010, he attended Mantis Field Guide Academy, where he completed his Field Guide Level One course, which enabled him to work as a game ranger at Shamwari Game reserve in the Eastern Cape. He returned to studying in 2012, and completed a diploma in Counselling and Communication Skills at the South African College of Applied Psychology, as well as a Bachelor of Applied Social Science from 2015-2017. He completed his counselling practicum at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Youth Centre in Masiphumelele and at Hope House Counselling and Resource Centre in Bergvliet.
Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose
Luvuyo is a filmmaker, photographer and performance artist based in Cape Town. Spending the majority of his life living in different locales, Luvuyo is continually unfolding his own creative journey. He studied film, BA Hons Motion Picture at AFDA Cape Town. The primary object of all of his creative work is to establish a discourse of societal issues that plague our nation. Through visual engagement, he aims to confront audiences with issues such homophobia, inequality, afrophobia, and intersectional feminism, by using the mediums of film, photography and performance art to effect positive change.
His work was included in a group exhibition at Museo de Ron, La Habana Cuba, in April 2012 – a photography exhibition exploring third culture kids in La Habana, Cuba, a group Exhibition – an installation piece, November 2016, exploring black queerness in a cisgender hetero-normative white supremacist society, as well as, Reading homophobia, a performance, installation and chalkboard piece with artist Brett Charles Seiler, at the inaugural exhibition at A4 Arts Foundation, September 2017. His filmography includes, Ngithethelele (2015) a five minute corrective rape awareness drama, Felix (2016) a ten minute psychological drama exploring privilege and class, and, most recently, Doreen (2017) a 24 minute drama about marriage, space & identity set in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
Ndeenda Shivute
Ndeenda was born in Windhoek, Namibia and educated at the University of Cape Town. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts majoring in photography. She was employed as the Curatorial Coordinator by the National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN) where she started as a intern in 2015, after her studies. She has organised, curated and assisted with exhibitions, as well as organised and managed projects such as the Tulipamwe International Artist workshop in 2017 and the 2017 Bank Windhoek Triennial.
Her interests are the role of the curator in the community and the ways in which the the museum and gallery collections can be made more accessible and representative of the communities they function within.
Melissa Waters
Melissa was born in 1994 in Johannesburg. She completed her Bachelor of Science degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2017, majoring in archaeology and human geography, and minoring in biology and philosophy of science.
In 2016, she and four fellow students staged a year-long exhibition of southern African pottery from the last 2000 years at the Origins Museum, in Johannesburg, an experience that led her to consider further studies in curatorship. Her interests, with regards to curating, lie primarily with museums and museum objects, knowledge production and the politics therein, as well as, museum accessibility and questions of their role in society. She is a sporadic visual artist and a maker of clothes and other textile objects, with a particular fascination for mending and rehabilitating textiles. This, along with her archaeological passion, fuels a further interest in object conservation.
Lonwabo Kilani
Studied Motion Pictures at AFDA with a major in directing animation. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose work cuts across mixed-media painting, experimental video animations, and performative interactive installations. As a collaborator and initiator of alternative spaces he contributed to the founding of artist collective "Gugulective", a digital interactive organization "Gallery.exe", and the artist-run visual arts residency "Studio-147". To develop the next generation of artists, he runs animation workshops and he works with a team to develop a digital arts curriculum that will focus on both high school as well as post-high school level digital arts.
Georgia Stonehouse
Georgia was born in Cape Town in 1995 and in 2002 her family relocated to Windhoek, Namibia. Her shared childhood between the two spaces and the liminal memories they created have been, and continue to be, a major source of inspiration and marker of identity.
Georgia pursued a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Cape Town and graduated with distinction in 2017. Her love for stories and the different modes in which they are told led her to study visual and art History, English language and literature, and historical studies. The intersections that exist between these disciplines have always fascinated her and pushed her to pursue curatorship as an avenue to explore creatively and critically examine these intersection further. In doing so, she attends to matters of identity, memory and the multifaceted experience of nostalgia. During her undergraduate degree, Georgia interned at a curated art tour company based in Cape Town and continues to volunteer at UCT’s Centre for African Studies Gallery. The two experiences have deepened her curiosity, and knowledge of curatorship.
San-Mari van der Merwe
San-Mari was born in 1995 in Newcastle, Kwa-Zulu Natal. In 2017 she completed her BA degree at the University of Cape Town, majoring in English literature, art history and media & writing.
Even as a practising artist, San-Mari’s interests have always leaned towards the meanings that can be found behind the artworks. This year, she wishes to explore creative ways to hear and tell the stories of people’s lives as expressed in art within the gallery space. While her interests continue to grow and change, San-Mari enters the year wishing to focus her research on not only exploring, but also challenging the traditional narratives in the field of curatorship and art. She remains constantly interested in intersectional feminism, queer studies and the expression and reception of mental illness in the art world. She wishes to continue to explore how these bodies have been and will be represented within museums and in galleries in the ever-changing art world.
Thembakazi Matroshe
Thembakazi completed her undergraduate BA degree at the University of Cape Town, in English literature, art history and media and writing.
She is interested in effecting a kind of research that transcends the confines of the academic institution. She wants to make a radical contribution to black intellectual histories and archives, by creating a heightened awareness and consciousness amongst black youth within, and outside, of the academy. She is passionate about a contemporary imagination of black radical feminism explored through queer black women’s art. Her approach to curatorship is to work towards achieving decolonized archives and spaces for knowledge production.
Amogelang Maledu
Amogelang was born in 1995. She was raised in Ga-Rankuwa, a township north of Pretoria. She graduated from the University of Pretoria in 2016, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology and visual culture studies. She developed an interest in curatorship in her final year after submitting a gallery exhibition proposal in visual culture studies exploring curatorial practices.
In 2017 she interned as a journalist for Gauteng-based radio station Jacaranda FM. During the year she reflected on the stories of ordinary South Africans; their experiences of their socio-cultural and political contexts as well as the role of the media in framing narratives and reporting stories related to them. This helped frame her outlook on the influence of the media and what style of reporting appeals to her.
Through this course, Amogelang seeks to develop her existing journalistic skills and theoretical background in visual and cultural studies by creating a specific link with art criticism and independent curatorship channelled through her research interests.
Those interests includes South African popular culture and its exploration of history, identity and creativity; especially in how music and dance forms an important part of articulating such leitmotifs. She is also interested in investigating how young contemporary South African artists have represented the female black body and how that has subsequently informed curatorial practices and archival methods, whether through subversion or reinforcements of the fraught and casual colonial representations of the body throughout (art) history.
Elizabeth Smith
Smith was born in Port Elizabeth in 1994. She completed a Bachelors in Fine Art in 2017 at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Majoring in printmaking she developed a keen interest in process-based work which led to the development of her interest in electronic objects, sound work and, more recently, conservational practice.
She hopes to refine her personal definitions of artistic practice during her time at the CCA, as well as acquire a better appreciation for the art object in the hopes of justifying the collection and study of broken and discarded instances of technological advancement. It is her hope that her research project will better facilitate future conversations she might have in regards to this topic as well as to arm her with a more substantial motivation for her process and thus perhaps provide a solid foundation for Masters level study. She also enjoys Ultimate Frisbee.
Lemeeze Davids
Davids, Johannesburg-born, graduated from Stellenbosch University with a BA(Fine Art) in 2017. She is both a practicing artist in a variety of media including sculpture & photography, and published poet, in both local & international journals. Academically, Lemeeze is interested in the subversion of art gallery models and the experience of looking, in a playful way, that attempts to unpack and alleviate the general alienation some viewers might experience in gallery/museum spaces. She is a maker of things and a spinner of language, learning how to become a carer of objects.
