UJ Art Gallery, in partnership with MTN SA Foundation, has launched a new exhibition: “The Blind Alphabet: Babery to Bigeminate: Sculpture and Sound by Willem Boshoff and Jaco Meyer”.
The exhibition opened yesterday (27 October 2021) and will run until 24 November. It leverages technology in an effort to expand the appreciation of art and South Africa’s cultural heritage.
The Blind Alphabet inspires and helps develop the arts for everyone. As an English dictionary written in Braille, it is intended for blind people to help sighted exhibition visitors to discover the meaning of the sculptures.
It follows the presentation last year during the Covid-19 lockdown of forty wooden forms representing the letter B in Willem Boshoff’s seminal work The Blind Alphabet. They were presented in wood, steel, and aluminium as part of an online documentary project for the Moving Cube, UJ Art Gallery’s online platform.
“As the corporate social investment wing of MTN South Africa, MTN Foundation is inspired by our belief that everyone deserves the benefits of a modern connected life. One of our core beliefs is to provide the necessary support for the development of an ICT platform for the arts, culture and heritage sectors,” says Niel Nortje, MTN Foundation’s manager: art collection.
The event brings arts, technology and innovation closer together. It comprises a physical exhibition with walkabouts as well as an online component with a Zoom webinar on YouTube and the UJ Gallery’s Facebook page.
The Blind Alphabet is part of the extensive MTN Art Collection. The sculptures are contained in mesh caskets intended for interpretation by visually impaired visitors. Attached to the lid of each casket is a sheet of aluminium embossed with a text in Braille, giving the word, its meaning and derivation, and examples for its usage.
“It is a national priority to help drive the education, preservation and development of South African history and heritage. For MTN, we are excited to help improve outcomes through technology and partnerships,” says Nortje.
The power of technology in art is reflected by developments since the 1990s to change the outdated nature of the Braille type format. This led to a new presentation of the letter B within The Blind Alphabet, with the added benefit of enhanced accessibility for the visually challenged through new processes of digitisation of the artwork and music, or sound, accompanying each of the forty sculptures.
Pretoria-based artist Selwyn Steyn, winner of the 2020 Emerging Artist Development Programme with his Memetic Sculpture: A Speculation on Cultural Contagion, was commissioned to create a new three-dimensional work in the form of a QR code for this exhibition.
Apart from Steyn’s winning work, the artworks by the other nine finalists in the Emerging Artist Development programme will be exhibited along with The Blind Alphabet.
The finalists are Alexa Pienaar, Franz Phooko, Lana Combrinck, Miné Kleynhans, Neo Diseko, Oratile Papi Koropi, Tré Mkhabela, Tristin Roland and Xanthé Jackson.
This digital experience, The Blind Alphabet – Letter B: Babery to Bigeminate, was curated by Annali Cabano-Dempsey, Curator of the University of Johannesburg (UJ), and Niel Nortje, Manager of the MTN Art Collection.