Showing 1–16 of 30 results

  • Beadwork, Art and the Body

    R380

    South African beadwork has a rich and diverse history and is abundantly represented in the beaded art pieces in the Wits Art Museum (WAM) collection. Some works date back to the 4th century CE but most date from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Currently numbering over 9 000 items, the three major collecting areas of classical, historical and contemporary African artworks are broad in their geographical range and deep in some local areas of specialisation.

    Paying homage to this collection, Beadwork, Art and the Body is a compilation of essays by scholars who have researched and written about the traditions, practices and aesthetic forms of beadwork in southern Africa. The book covers an expansive history of beadwork in South Africa from the 19th century to the contemporary moment. The artists and the beadwork featured range from Sotho-, Tsonga-, Xhosa- and Zulu-speakers, ending with a focus on fashion designer Laduma Ngxokolo, whose work has been inspired by Xhosa beadwork. Questions of ethnic affiliation and beadwork patterns are explored in relation to the different aesthetic forms of beadwork and its use as a marker of identity and status within and beyond communities.

     

  • Die Bram Fischer Wals

    R150

    Hoewel hy algemeen bekend is as die Afrikaner-Kommunis wat vir Nelson Mandela van die galg gered het, is bitter min bekend oor Bram Fischer die man. Fischer was ‘n gerespekteerde senior advokaat by die Johannesburgse Balie, wat gekies het om hom by die onderdruktes te skaar en wat ondergronds gegaan het om by die gewapende stryd aan te sluit. Hy is op 5 November 1965 in hegtenis geneem nadat hy vir bykans tien maande op vlug was.

  • Fools, Bells and the habit of Eating

    R190

    Cupidity, corruption and conciliation are the themes of the three plays in this collection from one of South Africa’s leading writes. The Mother of all Eating, a one-hander, with its central character a corrupt Lesotho official, is a grinding satire on materialism in which the protagonist gets his come-uppance.You Fool, How Can the Sky Fall? is an unbridled study in grotesquerie, reflecting a belief, traceable throughout Mda’s work, that government by those who inherit a revolution is almost inevitably, in the first decade or two, hijacked by the smart operators.

  • Hogarth in Johannesburg: Collector’s Edition : Etchings and Engravings by Robert Hughes, Deborah Bell and William Kentridge

    R1000

    Hogarth in Johannesburg is the timely product of several paths crossing. As the model of Hogarth suggests, some of these paths involve the tradition of art history and the position of the three Johannesburg artists within it.

  • Losing The Plot – Crime, Reality And Fiction In Postapartheid Writing

    R350

    In Losing The Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature’s founding moment was the ‘transition’ to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot- the mapping and making of social betterment – appears to have been lost.

  • Mooi Street and Other Moves

    R275

    This collection of six plays by South Africa’s leading playwright and actor features works written between 1984 and 1993. The works included are Under the Oaks, Over the Hill, Boo to the Moon, Smallholding, Mooi Street Moves (Vita Playwright of the Year) and The Return of Elvis du Pisanie (winner of the 1992/93 IGI Life Vita Award).

  • My Life and Valley Song

    R120

    My Life is based on the diaries of five South African girls who were growing into womanhood in 1994. The perspective of each young woman on her country and her people is conveyed with a mixture of naivety, exuberance, warmth and humour. A small Karoo town provides the setting for Valley Song, which explores the theme of youth in search of itself, and provides a lyrical metaphor for the new South Africa in which it was set, and has been termed one of Fugard’s most endearing plays.

  • Nothing but the Truth

    R120

    Nothing but the Truth is a story of two brothers, of sibling rivalry, of exile, of memory and reconciliation, of the perplexities of freedom

  • Paul Emmanuel: Men and Monuments

    R400

    For the past decade, in an ongoing project titled The Lost Men, renowned artist Paul Emmanuel has challenged conventions around war memorials. He has questioned which soldiers are memorialised and which are erased, and the stereotypes around soldiers and masculinity. Featuring artworks from his three iterations of The Lost Men, Paul Emmanuel Men and Monuments highlights vulnerability, an aspect of masculinity so often denied by history and society.

  • Somewhere on the Border

    R150

    Somewhere on the Border was written in exile and was intercepted in the post and banned by the apartheid censors. This one-act version of the play brings the South African Border War back into public discourse and pierces through the armour of silence, secrecy and shame that still surrounds it.

  • Sophiatown

    R120

    Sophiatown was the ‘Chicago of South Africa’, a vibrant community that produced not only gangsters and shebeen queens but leading journalists, writers, musicians and politicians, and gave urban African culture its rhythm and style. This play, based on the life history of Sophiatown, opened at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in February 1986 to great acclaim. The play won the AA Life Vita Award for Playwright of the Year 1985/86. This new edition of the play includes an introduction which sets the work in its historical context.

  • Suddenly the Storm

    R200

    Combative, volatile, constantly on the verge of exploding, Dwayne and Shanell Combrink are two halves of a white South African working-class couple, when Namhla Gumede, born on 16 June 1976, arrives on their doorstep. A smouldering dark comedy suddenly leads to startling revelations, rage and recrimination

  • Ulwembu

    R180

    Evil stalks the township of KwaMashu, near Durban. It comes in the form of Whoonga, a toxic mix of B-grade heroin, rat poison and other chemical components that almost immediately sucks its users into the vortex of addiction and the crime, deception and personal tragedy that goes with it. Caught up in the web, the ulwembu of the title, presided over by the dealer, Bongani Mseleku, are Lieutenant Portia Mthembu, a police officer in the frontline of the fight against the scourge; her son Sipho; his friend, Andile Nxumalo, and Emmanuel Abreu, a Mozambique-born spaza shopkeeper.

  • What Remains : A Play in One Act

    R150

    What Remains is a fusion of text, dance and movement to tell a story about the unexpected uncovering of a slave burial ground in Cape Town, the archaeological dig that follows and a city haunted by the memory of slavery. When the bones emerge from the ground, everyone in the city – slave descendants, archaeologists, citizens, property developers – is forced to reckon with a history sometimes remembered, sometimes forgotten.

  • Zulu Love Letter

    R250

    Set against the backdrop of the success of the first democratic elections and the launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Zulu Love Letter is a story of two mothers in search of their daughters.

  • And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses

    R140

    Two very different women meet during a long wait to buy subsidized rice and discover they have more in common than their poverty; an old man and child share a last, loving waltz; a cynical, disabled gangster learns humanity from a committed social worker; and a young girl finds her missing father and her role in the political struggle.