Finalists
For the past five years, the Outreach Foundation has offered an after-school drama programme for young learners and the youth in Hillbrow, in partnership with Tswelopele Frail Care Centre and Johannesburg Society for the blind. It has run as an intergenerational programme on themes like identity, belonging, cultural beliefs and generational curses, that has inspired intergenerational knowledge sharing. After suspending the programme, Letters to You and Me, the 5th anniversary of our intergenerational programme, was developed as a digital storytelling training programme and a training manual, based on Gcebile Dlamini’s five years of engaging intergenerational theatre making practice. Letters To You and Me, the 2020 iteration of the intergenerational project, was also co-funded by the International Relief Fund of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut, and other partners.
Established in 2011 to recognise emerging Southern African fine artists who demonstrate exceptional ability, the programme offers selected visual artists exhibition and mentorship opportunities, with art material sponsorship and a platform to have work translated in a different medium, in collaboration with the Spier Artisan Studios. All of this is aimed at developing artists’ professional practice. In the face of the pandemic, Nando’s arranged the Nando’s Creative Showcase event at Constitution Hill in November 2020, where a small COVID-compliant group of media and VIPs were invited to experience the various Nando’s Creativity programmes, including the Nando’s Creative Exchange exhibition.
The MTN SA Foundation and the UJ Art Gallery have collaborated successfully over the past four years by deliberating significant themes derived from the present social construct as reflected in artworks in both the MTN and UJ Art Collections. These projects are accompanied by educational and mentorship programmes, while an emerging Artist Development Programme was added in 2018. Exhibitions include 'Shifting Conversations' in 2017, which engaged on colonial and post-colonial narratives; 'Continuing Conversations' in 2018, addressing various forms of identity through portraiture; and 'Conversing the Land' in 2019/2020, focused on depictions of landscape in all its conflicting manifestations. In light of the pandemic, a full digital experience was introduced in line with the 4IR venture.