First Notice for VANSA's national conference
VANSA will be hosting a major national visual arts conference for three days in mid-Feruary 2006. This will be followed by their first national AGM at the Michaelis Fine Art School, UCT Hiddingh Campus. This is VANSA's first major project since the organisation was formed in early 2003. The conference is supported primarily by the Department of Arts and Culture and has received seed support through an NAC grant via The CAPE Africa Platform.
The conference hopes to invite key visual arts practitioners: artists, gallerists, academics, educationalists, curators, critics, collectors, administrators and bureaucrats, amongst others, to discuss the state of visual arts since 1994. Speakers and guests will come from all the nine provinces of the country and will include some international delegates. The majority of seats will be reserved for invited guests and a call will be made late in December for broader public interest. A special artists' workshop will run alongside the formal 'talkshop'.
The first half-day will be devoted to the formal opening and keynote speeches, including inputs from VANSA and from the Department of Arts and Culture about its visual arts development framework. The second day presents an overview of the visual arts sector both locally and international, focusing on the visual arts economy, promotion and display, education and training and the role of art in the broader public sphere through both plenaries and panels.
Also included will be a panel discussion on institutional change entitled 'Race, Art and Public Institutions', followed in the evening by an artists-led discussion, 'The Tyranny of Contemporary Arts'. On the third day a series of concurrent panel discussions will deal with art criticism and the media, creativity and new directions in the arts, Job Creation and Training, and Intellectual Property/ Repatriation/ Indigenous Knowledge Systems.
The conference will be closed after bringing the various issues into a manifesto for the future in a session entitled 'Visual Arts: Access and Transformation'. Throughout the conference there will be a host of social events, tours and presentations including a special 'Art Night' event.
