Representing Johannesburg in transformation: urban experience, imageries, and the work of art by David Koloane, Jo Ractliffe and Anthea Moys

Abstract

This paper focuses on artistic engagements with urban change in Johannesburg. The guiding questions are: (1) How do artists perceive and reflect urbanity, social change, and the transition of inner-city Johannesburg within their work? (2) In what ways can artworks contribute to Southern theories and decolonial and pluriversal conceptions of the city? The paper consists of three parts. The first offers a conceptual framing of the relationship between images, imageries, and imagination and their relation to artistic representation and practice. The second part focuses on the work of David Koloane, Jo Ractliffe and Anthea Moys between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, whose artistic work relates in various ways to urban imaginaries, individual experience, and the visual representation of Johannesburg. Inspired by the concepts of cityness and invisibility (Simone), the third part of the paper discusses the interplay between individual positionality and urban experience, the role of socio-political discourses and urban imageries for the artistic expression as well as the potential of such analysis for theorizing urban life and its artistic representations from pluriversal perspectives, as suggested by proponents of decolonial theories.