Nontobeko Ntombela

Nontobeko Ntombela is a member of staff at the History of Art and Heritage Management Department at Wits School of Art.

Nontobeko’s research synopsis in her own words:

”My research project investigates the relationship between the concept of refusal and biomythography in the work of visual artist Valerie Desmore. The aim is to explore and analyse the rejections Desmore faced in South Africa and London, which not only led to her exile in London, but also her career change from visual arts to fashion and back to visual arts again. In so doing, it interrogates the extent to which the artist’s own choice to reciprocally reject that which rejected her, has, in turn, disrupted known workings of historical art exclusions. In other words, the research explores how Desmore's leaving and returning to visual arts, as a form of self-determination, self-authorship and voice, complicates the often simplified understandings of South African Modern Black1 artists as passive participants in the making of their careers; always as discovered subjects. The thesis, therefore, meditates on a self-authorship that enables newer understandings of art history, which in turn stresses a different kind of canon, one that centres the artist’s agency as a prerequisite for any undertaking of art-historical writing. By examining the work of one artist, a woman artist, it asserts a particular positionality for South African Modern Black women artists more broadly.”