Grahamstown, get ready for the event of the year! This Saturday 22 August, the Rhodes Student HIV/Aids Resistance Campaign (Sharc) will host an art and wine auction at the Albany History Museum in a drive to raise funds for local HIV/Aids organisations.
Grahamstown, get ready for the event of the year! This Saturday 22 August, the Rhodes Student HIV/Aids Resistance Campaign (Sharc) will host an art and wine auction at the Albany History Museum in a drive to raise funds for local HIV/Aids organisations.
The auction will feature works by several well-known South African artists, including Standard Bank Young Artist Award winners Jane Alexander, Walter Oltman and Nontsikelelo Veleko, as well as local artists Brent Meistre, Dominic Thorburn, Zach Taljaard and Maureen de Jager. Several bottles of South Africa’s best wine will also be auctioned, two of which have been signed by Schalk Burger and Schalk Burger Snr.
All proceeds from the auction will go to the St Raphael Centre’s Siyaphumelela Programme which provides mentorship, education and support to teenagers affected by HIV/Aids. Sharc also hopes to create a sustainable bursary fund to provide young people infected or affected by HIV/Aids with the opportunity to pursue a secondary education.
"It’s a win-win situation," says Rhodes University Fine Art lecturer Maureen De Jager. "The HIV organisations benefit financially, Sharc benefits by getting some important publicity for its cause, and the artists benefit by having their work seen, and hopefully sold to an appreciative buyer."
There are more than 10 artworks on auction. Each piece has a different style and uses different mediums and the artists did not have to depict the HIV/Aids theme, although some did.
"My approach was to donate a work that I thought would relate to issues around HIV/Aids," says Meistre. "Social issues are such an intrinsic part of who we are as South Africans. They form part of our daily discourse and define who we are as a nation. I think most creative people who are producing artistic work in our South African context are in some ways always talking about these issues even if they are not conscious of it."
The work Meistre donated to the auction forms part of an exhibition entitled Class, a collection of photographs taken in 2001 of sections of building singage in and around Grahamstown. The collection of cropped words formed various related and unrelated mini-narratives between the individual photographs.
"The photograph I chose was of the word ‘responsibility’," says Meistre. "I thought this was pertinent as it conjured up a whole range of issues and concerns around the realities of HIV/Aids in our everyday lives."
Dominic Thorburn’s ‘Spectres of Colonel John Graham’ is from a series that focuses on the resonances of the historic military leader after whom Grahamstown was named. The lithographic print incorporates an early portrait of Graham with a cross through it made out of English tea leaves, which comments on how land was colonised, funded by the people who were harvesting tea and other products. The tactile quality introduces a physical element to the print. "It is a cynical comment on Graham’s misguided vision," Thorburn explains.
Albany Museum exhibition officer and local artist, Zach Taljaard, has donated portrait busts to the auction. Taljaard’s work focuses largely on the complexity of masculine identity and he often uses styles from different periods to explore the ways in which masculinity has been portrayed through history.
Maureen De Jager’s donation is a crystacal (similar to plaster) mould of an suitcase and forms part of her 2008 National Arts Festival exhibition In Sepia. Engraved on the lid is a page from one of her primary school workbooks about the British settlers. "The suitcase sculptures were prompted by my interest in the memory traces that we carry around with us," says De Jager, "and by the ways in which childhood experiences may shape and inform our adult lives."
The art and wine auction is the last event in Sharc’s week-long HIV/Aids awareness campaign. As part of the campaign, Sharc marched from the Steven Bantu Biko building to the main Rhodes administration building on Wednesday to demand a more involved institutional response to HIV/Aids at the university.
"I feel honoured to be part of the auction and hope the event is really well supported," says Thorburn. "I believe the university and Grahamstown communities should take a far more proactive role in issues around the HIV pandemic that impacts our lives daily. I hope the Sharc initiatives this week will shake things up a bit and I really applaud the energy and commitment of the students involved."
Download PowerPoint presentations about the artists and Sharc below.
