The Beautiful Project

GIPCA brings the year to a close with the Beautiful Project, with this two-day event calling into question our definitions of beauty and ugliness, with specific reference to the African continent. Proceedings will begin on Friday evening, with a keynote address by leading cultural commentator and critic, Sarah Nutall; co-editor of the prize-winning book Ugly/Beautiful: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, from which the event takes its thematic inspiration. 

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Start: 9 December 2011

End: 10 December 2011

Venue: Hiddingh Campus and Cape Town City Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performance – Mbeki and Other Nightmares

Latest of the Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary Tsepo Wa-Mamatu presents his highly anticipated production Mbeki and Other Nightmares. This bursary is a partnership between GIPCA, the Baxter Theatre Centre and Theatre Arts Admin Collective. The month long bursary gives an emerging theatre maker the opportunity of creating professional theatre in a supportive environment.

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Start: 29 November 2011

End: 3 December 2011

Venue: Theatre Arts Admin Collective

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performance – Statements after an arrest under the immorality act

The Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary, made possible by GIPCA, the Baxter Theatre and Theatre Arts Admin Collective, continues to fulfill its mandate of creating opportunities for new theatre makers by welcoming its latest bursary winner – Kim Kerfoot. Kerfoot will direct Athol Fugard’s Statements after an arrest under the immorality act. The play is a compelling love story set in a library during apartheid.

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Start: 2 November 2011

End: 5 November 2011

Venue: Theare Arts Admin Collective

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Anwar Mall

Surgical researcher Anwar Suleman Mall will present a unique and surprising lecture with an intriguing title, ‘Mucus and its foibles’. While touching upon some personal ideas developed through Mall’s involvement in mucus research at UCT and elsewhere, this lecture will trace the history of mucus research and the strides made in the understanding of the nature of this substance, the reasons for its tenacity and ability to protect the internal tracts of the body in hostile milieus, and why too much or too little of it can be problematic in a variety of diseases that include ulceration, cancer and even HIV-AIDS.

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Start: 27 October 2011 5.30pm

End: 27 October 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Stephen Watson: In Memory

Watson, who passed away in April this year at the age of 56, was a South African academic, poet, essayist, and director of the University of Cape Town’s creative writing programme. “Stephen leaves behind a body of work and affections which mark our literature and the way we imagine our landscape and our history,” said UCT colleague Imraan Coovadia. The tribute will take on the form of a reading of some of his work by his friends and collaborators, including Pippa Skotnes, Bill Nasson, Lesley Marx, Hedley Twidle, William Dicey, Carrol Clarkson, Imraan Coovadia, Penny Busetto and Peter Anderson.

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Start: 20 October 2011 5.30pm

End: 20 October 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Hot Water – Art and Climate Change

The arts are well placed to develop a consciousness of habits and destructive behaviour. As mechanisms for empathy, compassion and awareness as well as pause for consideration and debate, the arts are powerfully placed to contribute to turning the tide on behaviour that may be destroying vital natural resources. Visually arresting, charged with metaphor and symbol, visual arts and performance have the power to move, startle and deepen one’s consciousness. GIPCA’s Hot Water Festival brings together scientists and artists to look at what needs to be said and what are the most effective ways of saying this.

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Start: 14 October 2011

End: 16 October 2011

Venue: Hiddingh Campus

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Hedley Twidle

Dr Hedley Twidle explores colonial encounters through an examination of EM Forster’s A Passage to India. The lecture, entitled Nothing Extraordinary: E. M. Forster and the English Limit, relocates Forster’s early, very English and Jane Austen-like comedies of manners to an entirely different geography and social context, the result is a great text as problem text, and one in which (as students often complain) nothing happens. Twidle suggests that A Passage to India (1924) is a text that arrives at the limit of ‘the English novel’ and points towards ‘the novel in English’: the proliferation of postcolonial fiction in the second half of the twentieth century.

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Start: 13 October 2011 5.30pm

End: 13 October 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone:+27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Abner Nyamende

Oppenheimer Fellowship winner and highly respected UCT academic Abner Nyamende will discuss the role of the missionaries in the creation of the new black elite in South Africa, as modelled by legendary hero, historian and poet Isaac Wauchope. One of the big questions normally asked about the role of the missionaries among the Xhosa people is whether they took a wise step when they exposed the latter to school education and introduced them to western culture. It is a widely-held belief that in the nineteenth century, white farmers in South Africa bitterly criticised the missionaries for developing attitudes of ‘conceit’ amongst black people by educating them in their seminary schools.

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Start: 6 October 2011 5.30pm

End: 6 October 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Isabel Hofmeyr

Isabel Hofmeyr will introduce Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (Indian Self-Rule), and the theories and debates around it. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (Indian Self-Rule) is one of the great books of the world. It is the only place in which Gandhi set out his political theories in book form. Addressed to, and shaped by, its South African audience (identified as the South African Indian subscribers of his newspaper Indian Opinion) and context, Gandhi explores whether this diasporic community might be able to claim rights as Indian subjects. Gandhi’s themes of long-distance nationalism have new relevance in an age when globalisation and transnationalism are issues of increasing pertinence. 

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Start: 29 September 2011 5.30pm

End: 29 September 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Republic – Art, Authority, Nationhood

In the Gordon Institute’s latest venture in combining stimulating, innovative practice with critical thinking, and providing space for discussion; writers, choreographers, social analysts, visual artists and dramatists come together to consider notions of Republic. The series of performances, exhibitions, discussions and film screenings around issues of nationhood, power, authority and the body politic will take place, significantly, in various rooms at the Cape Town City Hall – a space evocative of meanings around ‘Republic’ of all kinds.

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Start: 21 September 2011 6pm

End: 25 September 2011 10pm

Venue: Cape Town City Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk

Dr Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk on considers ‘Another World: Property and Pacific Encounters in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line’, for GIPCA’s Great Texts/Big Questions. American film director, screenwriter, and producer, Terrence Frederick Malick has a career spanning almost four decades, in which he has directed six feature films, and received consistent regard for his work, with his films often considered masterpieces. The Thin Red Line is both a continuation of, and more fully realised meditation on, themes that have been a common thread throughout Malick’s work.

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Start: 15 September 2011 5.30pm

End: 15 September 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Music in the City – Vuurvoël (Firebird)

Vuurvoël (Firebird) will be presented as part of the GIPCA Music in the City concert series. Nominated for a Kanna Award, in the category Best Debut Production, at the 2011 Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees, the production of Vuurvoël /Firebird was inspired by the well-known fable of the rising Phoenix. Over the years composers drew inspiration from these fabulous feathered creatures, recreating their magical melodies and fantastical worlds through new composition techniques and sound-textures.

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Start: 14 September 2011 8pm

End: 14 September 2011 10pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Music in the City – Patsy Toh

Chinese-born pianist Patsy Toh will be performing on Wednesday 31 August as part of GIPCA’s Music in the City concert series. Toh will be performing Haydn’s Sonate in A flat major Hob XV1:46 and Variations in F minor, as well as Chopin’s Prelude in C sharp minor op.45 and 24 Preludes op.28.

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Start: 31 August 2011 8pm

End: 31 August 2011 10pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Film and Dance

GIPCA will be hosting a conference on the artistic intersection between dance and film from the 26th to the 28th of August. Filmmakers and choreographers will switch roles in the process of creating an interdisciplinary art form known as screen dance. Film and Dance, a weekend long event will probe a rising new art form that combines film making with choreography. Dance on film is slowly becoming the new visual language of our time.

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Start: 26 August 2011

End: 28 August 2011

Venue: Hiddingh Campus

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performances – After Cardenio

After Cardenio is a new work of experimental theatre, written and directed by Jane Taylor, based upon the true account of Anne Greene, as taken from the historical archive. It is a combination of sculptural puppetry, live performance, sound and visual art. The Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt, from Harvard University, has commissioned several theatre-makers/writers to make new works with ‘Cardenio’ as a hypothetical point of origin, in order to consider what Shakespeare may have reworked from Cervantes’ romantic hero. This work, After Cardenio arises from such an invitation by Greenblatt to Taylor.

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Start: 25 August 2011

End: 2 September 2011

Venue: Anatomy Lecture Theatre

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Sandra Young

Dr. Sandra Young will explore How Hamlet Became Modern – the character of Hamlet looms large as the quintessential modern subject, both in popular culture and through centuries of scholarship. As a recognisable cultural icon, he rivals the standing Shakespeare himself enjoys as a symbol of Western humanism and elevated culture, rightly or wrongly. But how did Hamlet, with his intensely inward focus and conflicted self-consciousness, become a model for modern subjectivity? Hamlet was not always appreciated primarily in these terms, removed from the play’s concerns with dispossession and disinheritance.

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Start: 25 August 2011 5.30pm

End: 25 August 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Cultural Boycotts

South African artists, including Nadine Gordimer, William Kentridge and the Cape Town Opera, have faced calls for a cultural boycott of Israel. Is this justified? Would it be effective? Should the Israeli occupation matter to South African artists and intellectuals? And is the experience of the boycotts of the 1980s here in South Africa relevant?” We are inviting academic Andrew Nash, artist William Kentridge, activist Zackie Achmat and Judge Dennis Davis to advance the discussion, which will be chaired, by Dean of Humanities and chairperson for the Gordon Institute Board, Professor Paula Ensor.

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Start: 4 August 2011 5.30pm

End: 4 August 2011 7pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performance – Capturing Sanity

2011 Emerging Theatre Director’s Bursary winner Pusetso Thibedi presents his original work, Capturing Sanity. The Bursary is made possible by GIPCA, the Baxter Theatre and Theatre Arts Admin Collective. Thibedi’s production was mentored by Liz Mills.Capturing Sanity features Thando Doni, Mkhuseli Tafane and Nieke Lombard.

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Start: 2 August 2011

End: 6 August 2011

Venue: Theatre Arts Admin Collective

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Directors and Directing

Want to come up close and personal with directors of the calibre of Malcolm Purkey, James Ncgobo, Janice Honeyman, Geoffrey Hyland and Aubrey Sekhabi, and actors such as Dawid Minnaar, Diane Wilson and Faniswa Yisa? Then you cannot miss Directors and Directing – an event that promises to sweep away the curtains and bring you in touch with thoughts around directing by some of the nation’s leading theatrical and critical minds, in carefully staged conversations that will be intimate as they promise to be illuminating and insightful.

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Start: 29 July 2011

End: 31 July 2011

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Exhibition – The Underground, the Surface and the Edges

The Underground, the Surface and the Edges is curated by Leora Farber and Anthea Buys. More than merely the stacked silhouettes of a distant metropolis, a cityscape has a story to tell. It traces the movement of wealth and the distribution of resources in a city. It bears witness to its history and influences, and asserts the city’s aspirations to more wealth, higher buildings, and greater infrastructures.

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Start: 15 June 2011

End: 2 July 2011

Venue: Michaelis Galleries

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

5 Thoughts – GIPCA Fellows Midyear Presentations

Similar to the idea of a post-doctorate, the purpose of the Donald Gordon Creative Arts fellowships is to make funding available to talented individuals who have graduated with an MA, MFA, or MMus (or have equivalent recognised creative research) to work on a year-long project within the Institute. “This mid-year presentation allows us to get a substantial taste of the work of these excellent and provocative Fellows but most especially since they will be presented all at once, this rich experience will foreground the range of innovation and the potential for interdisciplinary work that GIPCA seeks to make space for,” commented Jay Pather, Director of GIPCA. 

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Start: 12 June 2011 4pm

End: 12 June 2011 6pm

Venue: Hiddingh Campus

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela will explore a profound South African Question: “To transcend the discourse of race, don’t we need a dialogue of pasts?” This lecture explores these questions using recent events in South Africa as backdrop. The lecture will draw insights from Philip Miller’s Rewind and from the arts in general, as genres that transform past violence into something creative, touching some level of humanity that can initiate change of moral sensibilities. From the arts to real life, the lecture will conclude with a story from the Protea Village in Bishopscourt to illustrate how the memory of a troubled past can enable a transformed vision to construct new narratives that enter into the space of the Other.

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Start: 19 May 2011 5.30pm

End: 19 May 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

The Names We Give

GIPCA is proud to present ‘the names we give’, a weekend- long event including performances, jazz, film, public interventions and a groupthink called ‘Delicious Sensations’. Facilitated by Donald Gordon Creative Arts Award Winner, Raél Jero Salley, the event runs from Friday 13 to Sunday 15 May at the UCT’s Hiddingh Campus. “The names we give to concepts, things and people put them in a specific headspace,” said Jay Pather, GIPCA Director. “This in turn influences our interactions with them, and sows the seeds for selective sometimes myopic, viewing.”

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Start: 13 May 2011

End: 15 May 2011

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Riason Naidoo and Sean O’Toole

‘Shoot! Image and Text: A discussion on curating, art criticism and maybe football too…’ will be a two-way question and answer session between Naidoo (director of Iziko South African National Gallery) and O’Toole (art critic and former editor of Art South Africa) focusing on the role of the public museum, curatorship as a form of hegemonic disruption and the inflections of post-apartheid art criticism, with public participation in the exchange welcomed. 

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Start: 12 May 2011 5.30pm

End: 12 May 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Writers on their favourite pages

Three authors, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Rustum Kozain and Gabeba Baderoon, will each discuss a favourite literary page. “At GIPCA we are constantly pushing boundaries on how The Great Text may be viewed. In this instance, a microscopic gaze via a single page provides a key. Conceptualised by convener Imraan Coovadia, it is another inventive way of approaching contemporary subjectivities in a playful yet highly considered way. The exercise promises to be both entertaining and illuminating,” said GIPCA Director, Jay Pather.

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Start: 5 May 2011 5.30pm

End: 5 May 2011 8pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Sarah Nuttall

Sarah Nuttall’s public lecture, Reality Hunger: The Way We Read Now, is o is taken from David Shields’ book Reality Hunger. This lecture will be followed by a staged conversation between Nuttall and UCT’s Imraan Coovadia. Reality Hunger looks at the rise of reality as an “in-your-face phenomenon”. It explores the increased focus on non-fiction and the memoir in the literary world, as well as the rise of reality TV, the multiple uses of documentary and the rise of the figure of the curator.

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Start: 14 April 2011 5.30

End: 14 April 2011 6.30

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Music in the City – Renee Reznek

GIPCA will host pianist Renée Reznek as part of the Music in the City concert series. Reznek will be performing works by Leoš Janáèek, Claude Debussy, Giles Swayne and Olivier Messiaen, as well as two exceptional pieces composed by David Earl (Old Roses) and Hendrik Hofmeyr (Partita Africana). This will be the South African première of the works by Swayne and Earl.

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Start: 10 April 2011 4pm

End: 10 April 2011 6pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

International workshops and performances – Cie7273

The Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA), in partnership with Pro Helvetia Cape Town, will host Swiss dance company Cie 7273 – Nicolas Cantillon and Laurence Yadi. The company will present a series of free performances and dance workshops.

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Start: 9 April 2011

End: 13 April 2011

Venue: Hiddingh Campus

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Film and Exhibition – Place of Grace and Homebody

GIPCA and the UCT School of Dance present the premières of Place of Grace by Gerard Samuel (2010 Donald Gordon Creative Arts Award winner), and Homebody by Nicola Visser (2010 Donald Gordon Creative Arts Fellow). Place Of Grace is an open-air performance installation, featuring Samuels’ new dance film by the same title to be projected on an outside wall at the UCT School of Dance buildings, accompanied by performances by dancers featured in the film. Homebody is a landscape and movement improvisation project involving a group of mothers and daughters, taking place in Kalk Bay, Western Cape and Smitsville, Klein Karoo.

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Start: 8 April 2011 7.30am

End: 8 April 2011 5pm

Venue: UCT School of Dance

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Albie Sachs

Former Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs will present Free Spirits and Ravaged Souls: Tension at the heart of freedom of expression on 7 April. The lecture follows on from the keynote address that he delivered this year on opening night of the Time of the Writer festival in Durban. In the address he discussed the moral tensions that exist in the area of freedom of expression, also referring specifically to Zapiro’s controversial cartoons. “Free speech comes at a price, and it’s a heavy price,” said Sachs.

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Start: 7 April 2011 5.30pm

End: 7 April 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Hugh Corder

“Are the ideals of the South African Constitution too unrealistic? Do we have the continuing will to struggle? Are the newly powerful and wealthy not too complacent? Do we have the human resources with sufficient skills and commitment in the public sector to put good plans into effect? Is the private sector sufficiently socially responsive?” These are some of the provocative questions that Hugh Corder will ask in the next Great Texts/Big Questions public lecture.

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Start: 24 March 2011 5.30pm

End: 24 March 2011 6.25pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Great Texts – Jane Taylor

Jane Taylor will engage with John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (a key document in the early modern history of religious tolerance). Taylor will be reading this, not in relation to other tracts on theology and politics, but in relation to Diderot’s essay Paradox of the Actor. This reading allows for exploration of the shifting terrain around identity, consciousness and performance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as models of complex and theatrical personhood. Taylor is a writer, scholar and curator. Over several decades she has been involved in cultural critique and public scholarship as well as creative writing.

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Start: 17 March 2011 5.30pm

End: 17 March 2011 6.30pm

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Performance – Words Words Words

Emerging Theatre Director Bursary winner Leopold Senekal directs Words Words Words – an absurd, comic play by David Ives. The bursary is made possible by GIPCA, the Baxter Theatre and Theatre Arts Admin Collective.David Ives’ Words Words Words is the sixth act of All in the Timing, a short one act paradoxical comedy.

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Start: 11 March 2011

End: 14 May 2011

Venue: Theatre Arts Admin Collective

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za

Emerging Modernities

Emerging Modernities is a creative platform where academia and the arts meet in an interactive way to explore current conceptual issues around contemporary identities and art. The event is structured in a unique way, in that it combines performances, installations and exhibitions with panel discussions. Attendees will be given an opportunity to observe some of South Africa’s cutting edge artists in action, and then also reflect critically on the experience, with its conceptual implications, with a panel of experts. 

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Start: 18 February 2011

End: 20 February 2011

Venue: Hiddingh Hall

Phone: +27 21 650 7156

Email: ica@uct.ac.za