Ukugrumba

The 2018 Tierney Fellowship at the Market Photo Workshop, in partnership with the Tierney Family Foundation, was awarded to Market Photo Workshop’s alumnus Tshepiso Mabula ka Ndongeni. The aim of the Tierney Fellowship is to provide an emerging photographer with the opportunity to develop their career and skills through a mentorship programme, an ideal space for a photographer to develop a body of work.

Tshepiso Mabula ka Ndongeni was mentored by Buyaphi Mdledle.

Concept Text

Ukugrumba, which means to “dig up” in isiXhosa, is a body of work motivated by my family’s trauma as a result of activism in South Africa's struggle against apartheid, liberation and reconciliation effects within present day South Africa. It seeks to exhume experiences of the foot soldiers that sacrificed their youth by fleeing away into exile to join in the trenches for armed struggle for national liberation; including those who stayed in the country to continue the fight against the brutal apartheid regime. More often than not, those who are hailed as heroes of the struggle are well known political figures. Ukugrumba is a visual representation and narrative of the forgotten people who were affected both mentally and physically by the effects of the armed struggle against apartheid.

Ukugrumba, also, examines haunted places that bear memories of a violent past. The work interrogates conversations of the struggle and details testimonies of untold stories of former liberation soldiers and their families. The work revisits the past to shed light on the reality of the trauma that apartheid caused. This trauma continues to plague both the old and new generations of South Africans. The individual stories in Ukugrumba are part of greater narrative of South Africa’s past in relation to the new South Africa of reconciliation.

About Tshepiso Mabula ka Ndongeni

Tshepiso Mabula ka Ndongeni is a photographer and writer born in the Lephalale district of Limpopo, South Africa. Mabula’s interest in photography sparked when during a visit to a family member she was introduced to award-winning South African photographer Santu Mofokeng’s body of work Rumours/The Bloemhof Portfolio. She completed her studies in photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg in 2015. Mabula explores the small things through photography: exposing the humanity in oppositional, chaotic or even boring environments.

About The Tierney Fellowship

The Tierney Fellowship was created in 2003 by The Tierney Family Foundation to support emerging artists in the field of photography. The primary goal of the Fellowship is to find tomorrow’s distinguished artists and leaders in the world of photography and assist them in overcoming the challenges that a photographer faces at the beginning of his or her career.

The Tierney Fellowship programme ran for the first time in South Africa in 2008 and partner institutions include the Market Photo Workshop, WITS School of Arts and The Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.

The aim of the fellowship is twofold: encouraging fellows to produce a new body of work and creating a global community of artists that functions as a crucial support network in an increasingly competitive field. The Fellowship supports the recipients both financially, by way of a grant, and technically and conceptually, with mentorship and guidance from experts in the field.

Fellows remain an important part of the programme after the conclusion of their structured mentorship. Seminars and critiques are held throughout the year to facilitate interaction between all current and past recipients, encouraging discussion about their photography, work experience and lives as artists.

See Tierney Fellowship for more information

For 30 years, the Market Photo Workshop has played a pivotal role in the training of South Africa’s photographers, ensuring that visual literacy reaches neglected and marginalized parts of our society. World-renowned photographer David Goldblatt contributed vastly to the establishment of Market Photo Workshop in 1988 - 1999. Since then, the Photo Workshop has been an agent of change and representation, informing photographers, visual artists, educators, students and broader communities of trends, issues, and debates in photography and visual culture.

The Market Photo Workshop also runs a number of Public Programmes, which are a series of events involving and directed at professional photographers, visual artists, educators, students as well as the broader public. These Public Programmes seek to inform the trends, practices, methods, and contemporary ways of working and thinking in South African photography practice through exposure to a broad understanding of visual culture as well as a networking platform that encourages critical thinking and engagements.

Showcasing a number of high profile local and international photographers, as well as student and alumni photography work, the Market Photo Workshop has been able to build a strong and consistent audience base around our gallery, ‘The Photo Workshop Gallery’ in Newtown, which is on the same premises as the school. Since 2005, when the gallery was initially launched, the kind of platform it has engendered encourages not only emerging students to experience and enter into professional practice, but has distilled a new type of photographic practice amongst the greater artistic community. Various critical discourses, especially around the role documentary photography, have been stimulated by the multitude of exhibitions that have shown at The Photo Workshop Gallery creating dynamic interactions between students and the greater photography community. In 2016, Market Photo Workshop relocated to its new state of art photography facility at Market Square premises by the Mary Fitzgerald Square.

Market Photo Workshop is the recipient of The Principal Prince Claus Award 2018.

For more information, please contact:

Bekie Ntini Manager: Training and Public Engagement Programming
T +27 (0) 11 834 1444
E-mail: bekien@marketphotoworkshop.co.za

Market Photo Workshop
c/o Market Square
138 Lilian Ngoyi St
Entrance at Margaret Macingana Street Newtown
Johannesburg

Email: info@marketphotoworkshop.co.za
Website: Market Photo Workshop

The Market Photo Workshop is a division of The Market Theatre Foundation.