Exhibition by Refiloe Namise

A debut solo exhibition by Refiloe Namise

17 August - 7 September 2024  

Bag Factory is pleased to present ditshwantsho, dipalo, digopotso, a debut solo presentation by Refiloe Namise, comprising re-placed archive prints, video, performance, remembrances and readings.

Namise’s work explores the making and preserving of a place: Alexandra, Johannesburg. Through various sites in Alex, her work re-members and re-articulates moments and their broader histories. These engagements develop ways of writing, recording, storing and sharing social knowledge, heritage and culture.

Through this exhibition-in-progress, this year’s David Koloane Award recipient explores the idea of the Open Studio. The project’s title ditshwantsho, dipalo, digopotso, meaning ‘images, readings, reminders’ is uncapitaliszed to connote their existence within broader contexts. Just as the specific meanings of these words shift in response to their context, so too, the interpretations of Namise’s research are left open-ended, resolving themselves through their performance. In the Open Studio, the concepts of “research” and “artwork” become synonymous. Namise’s primary media being experimentation and intuition, many things come to realisation only in the realm of their public presentation.

As Namise’s research grapples with the idea of off-site site-specificity, ditshwantsho, dipalo, digopotso remarks on the movements that happen between the Studio as a place of work, the Archive as place of storage and the original Site as the place from which research materials to be worked on and stored (conversations, protestations, everyday lives) are gathered. Photocopies of newspaper clippings found in the Wits Historical Papers Research Archive, hang alongside a video projection, and remembrances of her onsite interventions. As archives may not leave the library, their photocopying returns them to the very public whose lives they document. This re-placement of these texts to their site of origin opens the possibility of their rereading and reinterpretation. It questions our modes of collecting, storing and sharing the knowledge we produce. The Archive as a fabricator of disassociation and timelessness, calls us to interrogate our notions of the “here” and the “now”, finding new ways to return our resonant histories to our present moment and engaging the continuities which reveal themselves.

ditshwantsho, dipalo, digopotso juxtaposes the dysfunctional Alex Heritage Community Centre (as a symbol of institutional power and empty gestures) with the Jukskei River (as a symbol of collective redemption). Through interactions with these Sites, Namise foregrounds the necessity of returning to historical moments by recognising, making, carrying and sharing knowledge, to reflect the flourishing of bodies through history. Thinking through the complexities of desire, neglect, and the persistence to belong, her onsite interventions serve as a vehicle of release for the repressed frustrations with the failures of the State. Live engagements, through gestures that offer ways of inhabiting the past through re-collecting and reminding, will take place in three parts.

About the David Koloane Award

This annual award was initiated in 2010 to celebrate the life and career of Dr David Koloane (b.1938-2019): internationally respected artist, curator, writer and founding member of the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios. In honour of David Koloane’s contribution to developing the arts industry through his ethos of mentorship and learning through exchange, the David Koloane Award benefits emerging artists who demonstrate passion, dedication, and potential for excellence. The award is open to emerging, South African-based, contemporary visual artists, aged 21-35 who are not represented by a commercial gallery. Artists working in the fields of painting, drawing, printmaking, lens-based and performance-based art are invited to apply. Recipients receive an intensive three-month residency at the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios – including studio space, a modest materials stipend, mentorship from the Bag Factory and established artists – culminating in a solo exhibition of a new body of work in the Bag Factory gallery.

Refiloe Namise a Johannesburg-based artist who completed her MFA in Creative Research and Practice (2022) and a BA in Fine Art (2016) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her work is multi-disciplinary, incorporating image, text, sound, video and performance. Namise grapples with the notions of return, re-membering and re-articulation through poetic gestures in which she re-enacts historical moments.