Worldings Virtual Residency Program
A Virtual International Residency Exchange hosted by The Bag Factory and Griffin Art Projects
Griffin Art Projects is thrilled to announce an international residency exchange in partnership with the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa to take place in August and September 2021. This residency opportunity will connect Canadian artists Nura Ali (Calrgary, Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsuut’ina, the Îyâxe Nakoda Nations, the Métis Nation Region 3), and Vancouver based artists and award recipients Josephine Lee and Xwalacktun who reside on the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations with Johannesburg-based artists Pebofatso Mokoena, Lebogang Mogul Mabusela, and Wezile Mgibe over the course of an intensive two-month creation period during which the artists will have the opportunity to meet virtually, build a relationship and engage in critical dialogue fostered through scheduled studio visits and discussion sessions, and to think through de-colonial futures together. This program will culminate in a live virtual open studio session featuring the artists in conversation over Zoom.
This residency exchange is hosted in conjunction with “Worldings” a collaborative, multi-layered project that includes an exhibition of the work of South African artist William Kentridge curated by Lisa Baldissera, as well as a public program and residency series that will explore the unique artistic perspectives and histories that exist between the Canadian and South African experience as seen through the eyes of artists, writers, curators and activists. This program will focus on resiliency through the lens of the historical events of the last year, and the ways in which solidarity, resistance and advocacy are remitted in hope, for their capacities to elicit lasting structural change and collective care.
The Bag Factory is a non-profit contemporary visual art organisation in Newtown, Johannesburg. They provide studio space to a cross-generational community of Johannesburg based artists. They also host a prestigious international artist residency programme, the David Koloane Award and Cassirer Welz Award, and regular exhibitions that showcase new work by emerging artists to the wider public. All of the BAG Factory’s programmes are accompanied by a public programme that encourages greater understanding of contemporary visual art and stimulates interaction between artists and the local community. With a pioneering 30-year history of providing a supportive infrastructure for artists, the BAG Factory is unique in combining art making with cultural debate and art exhibitions, thereby creating a fertile international environment for experimentation, innovation and cultural dialogue between creatives in South Africa and the rest of the world
Introducing the Cohort:
Virtual Residents
Nura Ali
Nura Ali is a visual artist, community organizer and social activist, living and working in Calgary, Alberta. Her multidisciplinary practise is deeply rooted in investigating the linguistic scaffolding upholding the construction of race and the vailed verbal and textual strategies that perpetuate white supremacy. Nura is deeply invested in strategies to dismantle oppressive structures and for this reason became one of the founding members of the Vancouver Artists Labour Union; a unionized workers cooperative with a mission to transform labour practices within the arts sector in order to create fair, equitable and sustainable working conditions for artists and cultural workers.
Pebofatso Mokoena
Born 1993, Ekurhuleni, South Africa | Lives and works, Johannesburg, South Africa
Pebofatso completed his NDip (Visual Art) at the University of Johannesburg and his BA (Visual Art) at Wits with distinction. He is a lecturer in Drawing and Interdisciplinary Presentation at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at UJ.
Mokoena has had 4 solo presentations of his work - The Pebofatso Experience, Inside Jobs, Internal Probes, and Neoclassical Taste Matrix currently on show at First Floor Gallery Harare. Group shows include Diptych; Disclosure, Fresh Produce, Songs of Sankofa, Inner Nature, Fortunes Remixed and South African Voices: A New Generation of Printmakers. In 2020, Mokoena received a merit award for the Wits Young Artist Award.
Emerging from early practice in drawing and printmaking, Mokoena’s painting practice is formally underscored by precise mark-making and division of space, thinking with ideas around micro and macro maps of politics, visual art, architecture and the environment, which is, in theory, getting smaller and smaller.
Mokoena’s work is currently rooted in the relations between micro and macro maps of meaning across multiple environments. Thinking through interdisciplinary modes such as architecture, layering practices, decoloniality, mind-mapping and aesthetics, Pebofatso uses his own personal narratives and a consistent application of experimental enquiry as tools to make sense of, and potentially build parallel cosmologies, set across a world that (in theory) is becoming smaller and smaller.
BAG Factory Onsite Artists
Lebogang Mogul Mabusela
Lebogang Mogul Mabusela (b.1996) is a multidisciplinary artist and a self-proclaimed monotypebabe and zinequeen based in Johannesburg. In 2019 she graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from the Wits School of Arts where she was also awarded the Standard Bank Fine Arts Prize. Mabusela has participated in a number of group exhibitions at the Wits Art Museum, The Project Space, Turbine Art Fair and Latitudes Art Fair, Design Indaba in Cape Town as part of top the 50 Emerging Creatives class of 2020 and more recently she was a recipient of the Young Womxn Studio Bursary sponsored by Sam Nhlengethwa and the Bag Factory Artists' Studios, at the end of her studio stay she participated Monotypes… A Monotypebabe Experience, a group show she co-produced and curated at the Bag Factory. Mabusela prides herself in being the founder of Makoti Technologies™ (est 2017) a Bridal gifts shop offering a dynamic range of gunz, tools and technologies that enhance women's desires and roast patriarchy, keeps them safe while maintaining their attitudes.
Wezile Mgibe
Wezile Mgibe is an art practitioner whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses performance, film, installation as a tool for social change. His work confronts prejudices and advocates against social inequality and creates a platform for critical self- reflexivity within unwelcoming spaces. Mgibe’s work is influenced by how things have come to existence, as well as motivations behind certain movements, reactions, human behaviors and mostly how these become symbols. Mgibe’s noted international commissioned projects includes video performance with LEAD Project and LSE Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa, M1/M2 Highway Billboard Feature by Centre for Less good ideas, A Film by Human Rights Defender Hub Artivism and University of York (CAHR) A contemporary trained movement artist who runs an On site project in public realm, is very interested in the concept of Belonging.
Griffin Onsite Artists
Josephine Lee
BIPOC Residency Award Recipient
“Through an interdisciplinary practice that includes sculpture, new media, installation, and performance, as well as an educational background in both the sciences and arts, my work explores the psychic violence of cultural assimilation and the conditions that inform our understanding of place, citizenship, and national identity. From this groundwork, my practice has led me to question how technology plays a part in reinforcing the violence of nation states, racist economic policies, and human dispossession.
I hold graduate and undergraduate degrees in science and fine arts, and have exhibited in Canada and the United States, as well as performed at documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. Recently, I was awarded the Oscar Kolin Fellowship, the Vera G. List Sculpture Award, and a Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist Award at the BANFF Centre for Arts and Creativity. I am an MFA in Fine Arts graduate from Parsons, The New School of Art, Media, and Technology. I currently lecture at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. I respectfully acknowledge that I live and work on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations."
For more information on Josephine Lee and the BIPOC Residency Award, please visit Josephine Lee’s residency page.
Xwalacktun
Recipient of Griffin Art Projects Inaugural Indigenous Studio Award
Griffin Art Projects is honoured to announce the distinguished artist Xwalacktun as the inaugural Indigenous Studio Award recipient. Xwalacktun is a renowned Master Carver of Coast Salish ancestry, from the Squamish and Kwakiutl clans. His remarkable work and career extend over forty years and across numerous forms, including public art, sculpture, metalwork, jewelry, glass work, drawing and printmaking. He is the recipient of the Order of British Columbia, the FANS Honours Award from the North Vancouver Arts Council which acknowledged his commitments both locally and worldwide and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. His public art awards are many, including more than thirty poles which have been presented throughout Scotland as a symbol of friendship between Canada and Europe, the 20 foot tall Squamish Pedestrian overpass spanning The Sea to Sky Highway, a red cedar memorial pole for Transport Canada, the major entry doors for the Gordon Smith Gallery Artists for Kids Building, a multimillion dollar home in Whistler featuring Xwalacktun’s four carved house posts, which received two Gold Georgie Awards in 2002, and a public work entitled, Sna7m Smanit (Spirit of the Mountain) in West Vancouver’s Ambleside Park completed in 2006.
Xwalacktun was initially self-taught with influences from his father and brother, and through careful observation of Coast Salish forms under the tutelage of Larry Joseph, became a skilled artist working to share knowledge on its unique symbolism and expression. It was at the encouragement of his father, the hereditary chief, Pekultn, from North Vancouver Seymour River, that he decided to become an artist, and enrolled at Capilano College and the then Vancouver School of Art, which later became Emily Carr University, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art. After completing his degree, he immediately began teaching and sharing his knowledge, a lifelong pursuit which melds artistic excellence and the artist’s natural warmth and generosity of spirit, with his desire to educate others on the culture and people of the Squamish and Kwakiutl Nations. Xwalacktun says, “We are connected to the earth, the land, the water, the trees. We are all one.
For more information on Xwalacktun and the Indigenous Studio Award, please visit Xwalacktun’s residency page.
Virtual Sessions
A key component of this residency exchange will be a series of online Zoom sessions facilitated by guest curators, artists and cultural producers intended to foster conversation, connection and critical discussion.The Worldings Virtual artists will join a larger cohort comprised of Griffin’s Indigenous Studio Residency Award Recipient and BIPOC residency Award recipient, as well as two Johannesburg-based studio artists nominated by the Bag Factory. Invited facilitators include Dr. Andrea Walsh, David Garneau, Usha Seejarim and Dr. Karen Tam.
