Title Unknown: When Rain Clouds Gather: (Re)making the Canon

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Notes

1 A South African modernist painter, who became well known in the 1960s. Her work often captured landscapes and the everyday.

2 A South African-born artist, who worked in an expressionist style of painting. Desmore spent 62 years living and working in Britain.

3 A South African photographer, whose works navigate between the everyday, the political and documentary photography. Motau is often recognised as one of the first Black women photo editors for a newspaper.

4 Lives and works in Cape Town as printmaker, painter and musician. Her works reflect personal history through place and time.

5 A South African printmaker, art administrator and opponent of apartheid, Dhlomo grounds her art on the socialist-realist and political. Her linocuts and woodcuts explore a wide range of issues, ranging from political events such as the 1976 Soweto uprising, to mere portrayals of the daily life of working South African women.

6 Mahlangu is globally recognised for her bright and bold abstract paintings that are inspired by Ndebele design. She is arguably one of South Africa’s best-known artists.

7 Mabasa has been working as a sculptor since 1974, her primary mediums are clay and wood. Her work often depicts Venda mythology and spirituality, while simultaneously dealing with themes of loss, violence and displacement.

8 Now retired, Ghesa worked as a sculptor, most often in clay and ceramic. She would often draw from vivid dreams and the ancestral connection therein to create her mystical and sometimes quirky sculptures.

9 South African ceramicist and sculptor.

10 Galdhari no longer works as a printmaker. Her works are some of the earlier examples of women working with so-called Indian cultural heritage and questions of patriarchy with particular reference to Muslim communities.

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Notes on contributors

Reshma Chhiba

RESHMA CHHIBA is a visual artist and dancer based in Johannesburg, who is interested in the intersection between contemporary visual art and so called classical Indian dance practices in South Africa. In her obsessive encounters with the goddess Kali, Chhiba draws on aspects of sexuality and identity as understood through Kali’s embodiment of female defiance and aggression. Through an exploration of Bharatanatyam mime (in the photographic), threaded penetration into the surface of saris and canvasses and a mixture of non-traditional painting media, she draws on the signs and symbols of goddess, destruction and aggression to create identities of defiant womanhood and revolt. She blurs the lines between the mythological/real, feminine/masculine, Indian/Black, performed/painted, and transcendent/physical. Her solo exhibitions include Kali (2008) and The Two Talking Yonis (2013). She is co-editor of The Yoni Book (2019), an extension of the 2013 exhibition. She is co-founder of Sarvavidya Natyaalaya (SVN), a non-profit Bharatanatyam school based in Gauteng, and also serves as Exhibitions Curator at the Wits School of Arts. Chhiba is currently a doctoral candidate at the SARCHi Chair in African Feminist Imagination at Nelson Mandela University. Email: [email protected]