This year’s Absa L’Atelier Art Competition, which opened in a gala event on July 28, marks the award’s 25th anniversary as the longest-running competition of its kind on the continent.

The 2010 finalist exhibition of just over 100 submissions seems, in the majority, to be examining themes of identity and local national context.

The first place was awarded to Ilka van Schalkwyk, a 2009 BFA graduate from the University of Pretoria.  Van Schalkwyk’s winning work entitled Reading Colour...

This year’s Absa L’Atelier Art Competition, which opened in a gala event on July 28, marks the award’s 25th anniversary as the longest-running competition of its kind on the continent.

The 2010 finalist exhibition of just over 100 submissions seems, in the majority, to be examining themes of identity and local national context.

The first place was awarded to Ilka van Schalkwyk, a 2009 BFA graduate from the University of Pretoria.  Van Schalkwyk’s winning work entitled Reading Colour deals with freedom of expression, articulated through an engagement with the condition of synaesthesia, which occurs when one's senses become crossed, e.g. letters of the alphabet turn into colour. Van Schalkwyk used her alphabet of colour to translate Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie into colour to create an art book. Important pages are enlarged and accompanied by protest songs, which each contains a coloured word that is found on the page.

The judges lauded the piece as “a cerebral affair reflecting intellectual games of texts that in themselves rebel against prescriptive institutions. Like the referenced songs and literary texts that were defiant in their strategies, this visual text becomes subversive of the social body. The work is a marvellous example of an open text with multi-layered meaning.”

Durban based Bongumenzi Ngobese was awarded the Gerard Sekoto Award for the most promising artist with an income of less than R60 000 per annum.  Ngobese’s mixed-media piece Kwa-Mamkhize portrays a collection of hidden parcels under a table, signifying secrecy and a lifestyle of makeshift storage systems of a society in flux.  His work is described by the judges thus:  “This is a social order of migrants, who have to take up their belongings and make them fit into any vehicle or, metaphorically, any culture, to be able to move on. The work holds so many possibilities of engagement in relation to our current society,”

Merit Awards were awarded to Abri de Swardt, Philiswa Lila, Collen Maswanganyi and Hanje Whitehead.

As part of her prize, Van Schalkwyk wins R110 000 in cash and a six-month sabbatical at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, courtesy of Absa. Ngobese wins a three-month sabbatical at the
Cité, French language classes and nationwide touring exhibitions sponsored by the French Embassy, French Institute and the Alliance Française. Both prizes include airfare and free access to galleries and museums in Paris.

All four merit award winners receive R25 000 and each of the top ten finalists, including Van Schalkwyk, Ngobese, the four runner-ups as well as Vincent Bezuidenhout, Sibusiso Duma, Maja
Marx and Lyle van Schalkwyk, received a R2 000 bonus prize.

The Absa L’Atelier Art Awards is Africa’s pre-eminent annual art competition. It has earned itself the reputation for being the most influential art competition on the continent, not only because of the incredible opportunities afforded by the main prizes, but also because of the unrivalled exposure the artists receive.

The competition is open to young artists between the ages of 21 and 35, and attracts entries from across the country, which are open to public viewing during the regional judging rounds.