NEWWORK is a year-long project culminating in an exhibition across three venues: The Point of Order, Wits Art Museum, and Arthouse Studios. It showcases works by 4th-year and Honours Fine Arts students, celebrating years of dedicated engagement and exploration.
The class of 2023, as any graduating class, fearlessly makes themselves vulnerable as they sift through the debris of the last century to assemble provocations in crafting the next.
The NEWWORK project is a year-long collective experience of interventions, installations, exhibitions, fundraising events, performances and networking…culminating in the graduate exhibition, taking place at three main venues – The Point of Order, the Wits Art Museum, and the Arthouse Studios. This final showing of works by all 4th year and Honours students from the Fine Arts Department is the pinnacle and celebration of years of continued engagement, navigation and negotiation between students and lecturers. It is an opportunity for the group to debut themselves as the next generation of young artists.
As with every graduating class of fine art students, the work implicitly and explicitly responds to the world in which the works are made. Every generation has particular sets of issues that inform them. This cohort has had to grapple with a post-fees-must-fall university ecosystem, further exacerbated by the global pandemic, which arrested and re-arranged their course of study significantly. It’s never easy being an art student. Climate change, extinction level events simmer alongside personal politics of dreams, fantasies, speculations and desires. Ancestral, inter-generational correspondences and ancient spiritual knowledge systems are all boldly and sensitively explored, as we witness collective punishment by historical machinations of imperialism (turned to neo-colonialism within a brutal capitalist system) that only ever allow some lives to matter.