Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o visits the Studio
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, novelist and theorist of post-colonial literature, and currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, USA, spent time in the studio during his recent visit to South Africa…
Reflections on the Art of Pitika Ntuli
By: Jessica Deutsch
Pitika Ntuli has had an illustrious career, with inclusion in prominent private collections worldwide, to international museums and local institutions in South Africa. His chiseling away at rock, wood and stone, both in exile and back in the country of his birth, records the transition of a nation. While Pitika has always been actively involved politically, his art has been a private world, one in which he responds to the spiritual life of his people. It is a place of poetry where pain and suffering are transmuted into faces and forms, where most often there is a hidden self. There is tragedy, but the raw stone, wood or bone left unworked are the blank canvasses embodying hope, waiting for change, believing in the healing and rebirth of his people.
Pitika is set to be a master artist of a new 21st century market already gaining momentum in South Africa and Europe under the genre of Contemporary African Art. However what sets him outside and inside this new art making is that he stands singular as an artist of transition. His work has never been one of anger, it is an art of music, of poetry, and also of triumph. He addresses more potently than any of his peers, this moment in time in South Africa and the evolution of its people. It is art that will remain as an indomitable marker of this era …
In 3D: The Divinatory Dimensions Of Pitika Ntuli’s Art
By: Sope Maithufi | University of South Africa
ABSTRACT
Scent of Invisible Footprints – The Sculpture of Pitika Ntuli (Unisa Press, 2010) is an assemblage of select photo shots of Pitika Ntuli’s stone, bone, metal, bronze, and wooden sculptures produced over a 35 year period. In book form, the assortment spreads over several sections, most of which introduced by a narrative on Ntuli’s art, and interspersed by his poetry. Taken collectively, the units depict Ntuli’s growth in South Africa, his sojourn in exile and his subsequent homecoming. In their intertextual relations, these genres locate Ntuli within a terrain of classic black African art pioneered by insanusi, the diviner whose trade is ritual therapy.
The proposition is that an alternative state of consciousness is called into being in order for this concert to be heard and seen carrying and expressing the mission of healing. The article’s first section concerns itself principally with mapping the moorings of this phenomenon. In this skeleton, the discussion relies on a theory of divination. This theory is introduced in the article’s introduction of the concepts of orature and of three dimensional arts. The outline of this theory is further elaborated upon in the synopsis of primary material, in the literature review and theory sections. The second and concluding part of the article teases out the textual details that Ntuli uses to populate his sculptures as instruments of divination. This final section also begins a dialogue between Ntuli’s sculptures, on the one hand, and his poetry, on the other hand, and also references this interchange as well as the biographical narratives on him in order to chart his genealogy of divination…