Announcing the 2024 Cassirer Welz Award Recipient

5 Jun 2024

Established in 2011 by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer in honor of her husband Reinhold Cassirer’s passion for the arts, this award has become a distinguished recognition for emerging local artists. Following the death of Stephan Welz, the award was renamed to Cassirer Welz Award to honor both men’s contributions to the South African art scene.

Through its enduring partnership with Strauss Education, the Cassirer Welz Award has been instrumental in launching the careers of its recipients, helping them gain recognition in the South African art market. As the award celebrates over a decade of excellence, Bag Factory Artists’ Studios and Strauss Education continue their commitment to fostering emerging talent.

Since its inception, the award’s reach has expanded onto the continent. The 2024 call for entries included artists from several countries within the Triangle Network, such as Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia; and it is with great pride that the award this year is presented to a Zimbabwean artist.

The selection jury, which included Bag Factory Director Maria Fidel Regueros andProgrammes Manager Nala Xaba, as well as Strauss & Co. Executive Director Client Advisory Khetiwe McClain and Art Specialist Arisha Maharaj, agreed that Takura stands out as an exceptional artist. His self-taught practice in found object sculpture will significantly benefit from this opportunity for both creative and professional growth.

“Since its inception, this award has helped the winners launch their careers and start making a name for themselves. It recognises artistic excellence, encouraging creative practice, and providing the supportive space and presentation platforms required by emerging artists. This award is an important part of Strauss & Co.’s ongoing and substantial commitment to young talent in southern Africa and on the continent – and is a powerful example of the company’s investment in the art of the future,” said Susie Goodman, Executive Director, Strauss & Co. 

With the generous support of Strauss & Co. and funding from Business and Arts South Africa (BASA), Takura will receive a three-month residency at the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios from 08 July to 27 September 2024, where he will work alongside permanent and visiting artists at all stages in their careers. The residency includes contributions to travel, accommodation, per diem, materials, and production costs. The residency will culminate in a solo exhibition of new works at the Bag Factory, opening to the public at the end ofSeptember.

Since its inception this award has seen the winners launch their careers and start making a name for themselves within the South African art market. Previous winners include Blessing Ngobeni, Bulumko Mbete, Nompumelelo Ngoma, Tshepo Mosopa, Asanda Kupa, Thato Nhlapho, Richard “Specs” Ndimande, Keneilwe Mokoena, DuduBloom More and Levy Pooe.

This year’s award finalists included:

Tawanda Takura has exhibited with Village Unhu at Cape Town Art Fair (2017, 2018) and Joburg Art Fair (2018), and undertook a residency in Joburg with the South African Foundation for Contemporary Art (SAFFCA) in 2019. His work was included in a group show at the Guns & Rain Gallery in March 2019, the Cape Town Art Fair (2020), and in a two-man show with Thina Dube (2020). He has since participated in the group exhibitions Unnatural Objects and Meeting Places, a collaborative exhibition with Bag Factory (2021). In 2021 he participated in a residency with Guns & Rain and in a residency at the Nirox Sculpture Park, one after the other. He also had work showing during the Nirox Winter Exhibition, 2022.

Trained as a shoemaker, Takura takes apart and expertly re-assembles old shoes which carry the traces and biographies of their owners. Sometimes combined with other found objects and texts, these new figurations carry the subtle but persistent smell of rubber and leather. Hollow, hybrid, tortured and distorted, sometimes carnivalesque, Takura’s work comments on socio-political injustice, and often takes clear aim at what he sees as the extractive and hypocritical practices of charismatic churches. The artist describes how, “at times, in earlier years, I was considered a madman, going around collecting old shoes… people would see a heap of shoes in my house”. 

Fred Zucule is a photographer, poet and cultural worker from Maputo, Mozambique, currently based in Nairobi, Kenya. Their work explores themes of migration, queerness and care, with the body as tool, metaphor and subject. Raised across multiple geographies from Maputo, to Nairobi, Johannesburg, to Los Angeles and New York; their photography blends these experiences through a mystical, surreal and queer lens. Kuln’Zu is also a film programmer having worked with New York African Film Festival, Atlanta African Film Festival and more. They graduated from Pomona College in 2021 with a BA in Africana Studies, with concentrations in Media and Molecular Biology.

Chumani “ivukuvuku” Mantanga is from eMgwenyane village at Tsomo in the Eastern Cape. She is a multi-dimensional artist who works across disciplines of textiles, painting, glass, ceramics, writing photography and performance. In her work, she explores themes of memory, healing, history and ancestry. ivukuvuku completed her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine and Applied Arts at the Tshwane University of Technology (2019), majoring in glass and painting. The name ivukuvuku is based on the realisation of how a piece of cloth, sometimes unpleasant represent the rebirth of a transformed self, and celebrating a healed versions of selves.

In her artworks, materiality plays a vital role as she is able to connect with her mediums – those found in places like rivers, swamps and gravel paths in her village – in a way that revives the character of what was once discarded, then later brought into life – a rebirth of ivukuvuku. By mostly using a sackcloth to unite all the details entailed in her artworks, ivukuvuku is a healer and a healing spirit to (her)sel(ves). She describes the sackcloth as a skin; the celebration of (her)sel(ves) that suspends the societal beliefs of how ivukuvuku should identify. The sackcloth is also a symbolic healing of memory that represents the active processes of reconnecting and recreating relationships within the sacred space where the presence of her nature and her ancestors reside. As a result, the sackcloth undergoes through the elements of water, fire, wind and sun before it is then incorporated with beadwork, fire. 

Keabetswe Seema is a visual artist working from Johannesburg. She a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Pretoria and her practice revolves around the politics of the body and identity, exploring themes of afro- futurism, non-monolithic selfhood, family archives, spirituality, and the hypervisible body.

Her works welcome the audience into an alternative universe where playful experimentation meets thought-provoking social commentary; it invites viewers to journey through mystery, absurdity and brilliance that seamlessly blends African futures and the profound.

Masindi Ikhona Nafisa Mbolekwa is a young artist living and practicing in Johannesburg, South Africa. Mbolekwa’s primary practice is a conversation with painting, history, culture, space, community and God. Born into a proud and rich indigenous culture in a space of little tolerance, he finds himself caught between the necessity of modernism, and the romance of tradition; the institutional pull of the west, and the soul-bound call of home.

In interrogating identity, colonial mechanisms, religion, metaphysics, and the popularized, mythicized histories of “man” (as centred on the hegemonic west), he fashions a mythos of his own: an explorative pseudo-narrative to ground his experienced state of ‘groundlessness’. A reflection of liminality, a questioning of binaries both real and constructed, a debate with god, an ethereal safe space, a descent into the shadows of the divine.

Nyashadzashe Marovatsanga is a young painter who lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe. He has been an artist in residency at Village Unhu, Harare, since 2017. Founded by Georgina Maxim, Gareth Nyandoro, and Misheck Masamvu, Village Unhu is an art space that nurtures artistic local talent. Under the mentorship of Misheck Masamvu, Marovatsanga has developed a powerful painterly language, using gestural brushstrokes and bold colouration.

He speaks of his work: “Sometimes, I go blank, then the portraits revive my everyday struggle. Sometimes I dream, then I reveal the dreams in my portraits. Sometimes I laugh, and the teeth show all the cracks. Sometimes, the sun shines too hot.

Marovatsanga’s works were shown for the first time in South Africa as part of Different Angles, an exhibition that was held at THK Gallery Cape Town. He has exhibited with THK Gallery at 1-54 London, as well as various local art fairs. He is represented in collections in South Africa, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe, including in the Chris Moser collection (Vienna/Austria).

ABOUT BAG FACTORY ARTISTS’ STUDIOS

The Bag Factory is a non-profit contemporary visual art organisation in Newtown, Johannesburg. With a pioneering 33-year history of providing a supportive infrastructure for artists, the Bag Factory is unique in combining art making with cultural debate and art exhibitions, thereby creating a fertile international environment for experimentation, innovation, and cultural dialogue between creatives in South Africa and the rest of the world. We provide studio space to a cross-generational community of Johannesburg-based artists and host a prestigious international artist and curator residency programme. We present regular exhibitions in our gallery that showcase new work by emerging artists to the wider public, and we also support the professional development of artists and curators throughworkshops, mentorship, and the prestigious David Koloane and Cassirer Welz awards. All our programmes are accompanied by a public programme that encourages greater understanding of contemporary visual art and stimulates interaction between artists and the local community. We are affiliated with the international Triangle Network.

ABOUT STRAUSS & CO

Strauss & Co is the leading art auction house in Africa, offering a diverse range of art, design, wine and jewellery through monthly online sales and marquee live auctions. With a focus on African and international art, Strauss & Co caters to art enthusiasts at all price levels, positioning itself as a market leader in modern and contemporary art auctions in Africa. The company actively champions artists, designers and wine producers from Africa and supports various education and community engagement programmes.