NEWWORK – Wits Fine Art Graduating Class

NEWWORK 24

Uncheesing Umshini – a love letter to my beloved RISO lovers

It would be not only cheesy, but also truly disingenuous to declare you, my beloved Umshini, aka NEWWORK24 as the highlight of any previous NEWWORK cohort that I have had the privilege to accompany as Academic Lead of the department, alongside the exemplary talents and experiences of y/our Exhibitions Coordinator and Curator, Reshma Chhiba.

What you are, my beloved reader, are an index to many firsts, starting with your audacity to (re)name yourself, by the use of the alias that precedes what you inherit as tradition i.e. Umshini, instead of the NEWWORK24 that you build on since the original NEWWORKsomething. This audacity is double-sided, as South Africans understand the complexity of the term in its historical trajectory.

You are a first to attempt to carry the experiences of collective/self-publishing gleaned from your 3rd year of your BAFA degree into the conception, negotiations, struggles and the making of this beautiful object we all now hold in our hands, as you conclude your 4th and ‘exit’ year.

Your collective/self-publications attracted the attention of, and are in the collection of Center for Art, Research and Alliance (CARA) in New York, the home of Talib Kweli, who rapped “If I could make it in New York/I figured anywhere I’d make it” in the track ‘Good Mourning’, from the 2000 Reflection Eternal album, Train of Thought. But you, Umshini, has proven that your horizons are not only overseas…

In May 2023, you offered your posters, RISO remixes of the Medu Art Ensemble posters, to form part of the department’s marketing and recruitment packs that were distributed at the Sibikwa Arts Centre’s Career Expo in Benoni, Erkhuruleni. That way, you not only offered original works of art to high school learners who study largely in townships in a country that still struggle to offer visual arts in FET phase but you also shared a piece of (Medu Art Ensemble) art history in a township that is central to the seminal years of Thami Mnyele, one of the (Medu) artists killed by apartheid South Africa in Botswana in 1985.

It may not be a first, but you have also gone as far as the University of Pretoria, accompanied by your beloved RISO, to engage a public at the Javett-UP, opening the pages of your collective/self-publications with vulnerable grace.

If that is too far, the posters that made it to townships of Erkhuruleni actually emerged in the first term of 2023 when the afterlives of Fees Must Fall piqued your consciousness so much that 90 percent of you amended the course brief (to remix Medu posters by inserting burning issues of your time) to link ‘history’ with the plight of yourselves/fellow students. Summoning history into not only your present, but your classroom, your department, your school, your faculty, your campus. Refusing to be stunned.

It is at this very campus that in April 2024, you continued to open the pages of your 2023 collective/self-publications at the Wits Writing Festival, understanding that art does not start nor end with an art school especially in a university that doesn’t really love its artists. And then there was the Zine Jam.

Oh, how can we forget the Zine Jam the end that difficult term 1 of 2023!?? This was not a first, of course, you gracefully borrowed the Zine Jam idea from the 2017 D&CPIII group (who named the RISO Beyonce). Your Zine Jam shared the WSOA courtyard with NEWWORK23 cohort (echoing the quarterly fundraising and jols by the NEWWORK15 cohort) as a space to invite publics to respond to your editorial questions, slowly building to a rocking dance party, a night school with flava.

This letter is not really about a hit-list of firsts, neither is it about your wins, because bagologolo ba re lebelo ga se la motlogapele, le na le mo tsebi wa lona. Of course you have faced many blood, sweat and tears. And failures. You have you failed to achieve in your ambitious, beautiful and inspired dreams. For example, making thousands of the posters (for instance 100 000 because Y not? It’s very cheap with the RISO as the 2017 cohort named it Beyonce – it’s got the formation to do so in no time) and selling them as cheaply as possible (eg R5 per poster) in order to make not only make them even more accessible, but also to raise something like R500 000 as a fund to yourselves/fellow student/s.

It is not failure, if the dreams you uttered continue to be, as Louis Chude-Sokei penned, an “echo trailing into infinity” as “the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history”.

May all your dreams not only transpire, but may they also multiply, reverberate, resonate, inspire…

– Rangoato Hlasane, 23 October 2024, Troyeville, Johannesburg