5 OCT 2020 - 30 SEP 2021
The Bag Factory is delighted to announce that Cheriese Dilrajh and Hemali Khoosal have been selected as joint recipients of the annual Young Womxn Studio Bursary, funded by Bag Factory alumni artist Sam Nhlengethwa. They will share a fully funded studio bursary at the Bag Factory for twelve months from October 2020 to September 2021.
The response to the call for applications for this year’s Young Womxn Studio Bursary was overwhelming, demonstrating a high level of talented emerging womxn artists in South Africa. Taking into consideration the challenges of the current global economic climate and the strength of the applications received, we decided to maximise the benefit of this bursary by offering it to two promising emerging womxn artists. We are thrilled that Cheriese and Hemali were open to this proposal and they are both excited at the prospect of working together in a creative environment that promotes exchange and experimentation.
The Bag Factory recognises the huge disruption to the lives and livelihoods of artists this year as a result of the Coronavirus, so we have decided to help support even more artists during this exceptionally difficult time. Another notable artist who impressed us with her perseverance and dedication to her artistic practice is Lebogang Mogul Mabusela, who has been selected as a runner-up and will receive a three-month studio bursary running from October to December 2020.
Cheriese Dilrajh (b. 1997, Kwa- Zulu Natal) completed a BA Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand (2015-2018). Her actual education is the streets. Her areas of interest include (but are not limited to) migration, complexity of meaning and the making of new meanings. Often it is tied to inherited history, the creation of imagination and confronting and disrupting violence. Through sensory, audio and visual, written, multitudinal forms and occupation she engages with intergenerational, inherited and created knowledges, and the distortion and formation of self through personalized narratives that are a becoming of herstory.