South African Culture
South Africa is known for its ethnic and cultural diversity. Amongst black South Africans, a substantial number of rural inhabitants lead largely impoverished lives. Almost all South Africans speak English to some degree of proficiency, in addition to their native language, with English acting as a lingua franca in commerce, education, and government. South Africa has eleven official languages, but other indigenous languages are also spoken by smaller groups, chiefly Khoisan languages. Members of the middle class, who are predominantly white and Indian but whose ranks include growing numbers of other groups, have lifestyles similar in many respects to that of people found in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. The Apartheid state legally classified South Africans into one of four race groups, and determined where they could live, and enforced segregation in education, work opportunities, public amenities and social relations. Although these laws were ab ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Khoisan
Khoisan , or (), according to the contemporary Khoekhoegowab orthography, is a catch-all term for those indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who do not speak one of the Bantu languages, combining the (formerly "Khoikhoi") and the or ( in the Nǁng language). The San were formerly called Bushmen, (from Afrikaans ''Boesmans'' from nl, Boschjesmens); and the were formerly known as " Hottentots", speculated to be a Dutch onomatopoeic term referring to the click consonants prevalent in the Khoekhoe languages. However there is no evidence of this etymology."A very large number of different etymologies for the name have been suggested ... The most frequently repeated suggestion ... is that the word was a spec. use of a formally identical Dutch word meaning ‘stammerer, stutterer’, which came to be applied to the Khoekhoe and San people on account of the clicks characteristic of their languages. However, evidence for the earlier general use appears to be lacking. Another fr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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William Kentridge
William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films, especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s. The latter are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art. Kentridge has created art work as part of design of theatrical productions, both plays and operas. He has served as art director and overall director of numerous productions, collaborating with other artists, puppeteers and others in creating productions that combine drawings and multi-media combinations. Early life and career Kentridge was born in Johannesburg in 1955 to ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Marlene Dumas
Marlene Dumas (born 3 August 1953) is a South African artist and painter currently based in the Netherlands. Life and work Dumas was born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa and grew up in Kuils River in the Western Cape, where her father had a vineyard. Dumas witnessed the system of Apartheid during her childhood. Dumas began painting in 1973 and showed her political concerns and reflections on her identity as a white woman of Afrikaans descent in South Africa. She studied art at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 1975, and then at Ateliers '63 in Haarlem, which is now located in Amsterdam. She studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam in 1979 and 1980. She currently lives and works in the Netherlands and is one of the country's most prolific artists. Dumas has also featured in some films, '' Miss Interpreted'' (1997), Alice Neel (2007), Kentridge and Dumas in Conversation (2009), '' The Future is Now!'' (2011), and ''Screwed'' (2017). Several books included il ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Zwelethu Mthethwa
Zwelethu Mthethwa (born 1960) is a South African painter and photographer. He was convicted of murder in 2017, and is currently incarcerated at Pollsmoor Prison. Biography Mthethwa, a native of Durban, graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. In 1985 he received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in imaging arts in 1989. Upon returning home, he worked for some years in business, and then became a lecturer on photography and drawing at the Michaelis School in 1994. He left the post in 1999 to devote himself full-time to his art. Mthethwa is known for his large format color photographs, but also works in paint and pastel; he has had over 50 solo exhibitions in galleries around the world. His work was included in the 2005 Venice Biennale and the 2004 Gwangju Biennale. Murder conviction In 2014, Mthethwa was charged with the murder of a 23-year-old woman named N ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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David Goldblatt
David Goldblatt HonFRPS (29 November 1930 – 25 June 2018) was a South African photographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the period of apartheid.Weinberg, Paul.David Goldblatt: Photographer Who Found the Human in an Inhuman Social Landscape" The Conversation, 18 May 2019. After apartheid had ended he concentrated more on the country's landscapes. What differentiates Goldblatt's body of work from those of other anti-apartheid artists is that he photographed issues that went beyond the violent events of apartheid and reflected the conditions that led up to them. His forms of protest have a subtlety that traditional documentary photographs may lack: " dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgments. . . . This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite." He has numerous publications to his name. Early life Goldblatt was born in Randfontein, Gauteng Province, and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Zanele Muholi
Zanele Muholi (born 19 July 1972) is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation. Muholi's work focuses on race, gender and sexuality with a body of work that dates back to the early 2000's, documenting and celebrating the lives of South Africa's Black lesbian, gay, transgender, and intersex communities. Muholi is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, explaining that "I'm just human". Muholi was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2015. They received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in 2016, a Chevalier de Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2016, and an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2018. Mulholi has a restrospective exhibition on at Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris from 1 February to 25 May 2023. Biography Zanele Muholi was born and raised in Umlazi, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. Their father was Ashwell Tanji Banda Muholi and their mother was Bes ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mikhael Subotzky
Mikhael Subotzky (born Cape Town, South Africa, 1981) is a South African artist based in Johannesburg. His installation, film, video and photographic work have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries, and received awards including the KLM Paul Huf Award, W. Eugene Smith Grant, Oskar Barnack Award and the Discovery Award at Rencontres d'Arles. He has published the books ''Beaufort West'' (2008), ''Retinal Shift'' (2012) and, with Patrick Waterhouse, ''Ponte City'' (2014). Subotzky is a member of Magnum Photos. Life and work Subotzky graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2004. For his book ''Beaufort West'', Subotzky photographed in and around a prison built within a traffic circle in the town of Beaufort West. For six years he and Patrick Waterhouse collaborated in photographing in Ponte City, a 54-storey cylindrical building in Johannesburg – the tallest residential tower block in Africa – resulting in their book and ex ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Victoria And Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The V&A is located in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in an area known as "Albertopolis" because of its association with Prince Albert, the Albert Memorial and the major cultural institutions with which he was associated. These include the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall and Imperial College London. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. As with other national British museums, entrance is free. The V&A covers and 145 galleries. Its collection spans 5,000 years of art, from ancient times to the present day, from the cultures of Europe, North America, Asia and North Africa. Ho ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Trekboer
The Trekboers ( af, Trekboere) were nomadic pastoralists descended from European settlers on the frontiers of the Dutch Cape Colony in Southern Africa. The Trekboers began migrating into the interior from the areas surrounding what is now Cape Town, such as Paarl (settled from 1688), Stellenbosch (founded in 1679), and Franschhoek (settled from 1688), during the late 17th century and throughout the 18th century. The Trekboer includes mixed-race families of partial Khoikoi descent that had also become established within the economic class of burghers. Origins The Trekboers were seminomadic pastoralists, subsistence farmers who began trekking both northwards and eastwards into the interior to find better pastures/farmlands for their livestock to graze, as well as to escape the autocratic rule of the Dutch East India Company (or VOC), which administered the Cape. They believed the VOC was tainted with corruption and not concerned with the interests of the free burghers, the soci ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Afrikaner
Afrikaners () are a South African ethnic group descended from Free Burghers, predominantly Dutch settlers first arriving at the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th and 18th centuries.Entry: Cape Colony. ''Encyclopædia Britannica Volume 4 Part 2: Brain to Casting''. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 1933. James Louis Garvin, editor. They traditionally dominated South Africa's politics and commercial agricultural sector prior to 1994. Afrikaans, South Africa's third most widely spoken home language, evolved as the First language, mother tongue of Afrikaners and most Cape Coloureds. It originated from the Dutch language, Dutch vernacular of South Holland, incorporating words brought from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and Madagascar by slaves. Afrikaners make up approximately 5.2% of the total South African population, based upon the number of White South Africans who speak Afrikaans as a first language in the South African National Census of 2011. The arrival of Portugal, Portug ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |