My research focuses on the artistic communities of Johannesburg in order to understand South Africa’s changing economic and political landscape and the relationship between artistic practices, labor, and national development. The project investigates how the production of cultural, artistic objects in the post-apartheid moment is bound up with questions of the nation’s economic and political past and future. I ask how the labor of contemporary artists, in what is recognized as fine art, craft or “ethnic” art, or simply work, shape personal and national futures in the country, and why these...
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