The North-West University (NWU) Gallery is currently hosting the “RACONTEUR: Covid-19 the NWU Way” art exhibition. This noteworthy exhibition will run until 11 October and includes the works of 11 NWU alumni and lecturers.

According to gallery curator, Amohelang Mohajane, this exhibition allows art lovers to experience the kind of storytelling that is mindful, intricate, and in some cases humorous.

She says there is also a serious side to this exhibition as the artworks were created during, and partly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic affecting South Africa and the world at large. 

“This pandemic has not only affected our economy in multiple ways, but it has also severely impacted our social lives and our physical well-being.

“The exhibition becomes an intervention in a fleeting moment of time – an intervention that requires us to reflect on our delicate forms of fragility during this precarious time,” says Amohelang.

Through this exhibition, she is attempting to stretch the viewer’s mind to appreciate the importance of telling stories during times of crises. “Through narration, there arises an opportunity to not only depart from the quotidian, which can in itself be exhausting, but to further explore possibilities of how else to live – how else to persist during this time of uncertainty.”

She says the exhibition is an invitation to explore the generative power of imagination and to understand the therapeutic importance of narrating our feelings, troubles, aspirations, fears, uncertainties and the small victories that saturate our lives during this pandemic.

“The very act of story-telling thus becomes important as a curatorial undertaking, just as much as it is as an artistic one,” she adds. 

“While it is uncertain what the eventual impact of this pandemic will be, and while the uncertainties that pervade our lives continue to persist amidst this crises, this exhibition invites us to pause, reflect and make sense of and work through these uncertainties with some degree of contentment. The artists and alumni – the raconteurs of this exhibition – through their diversely rich works, all aim to pursue this task by rendering meaning to this present moment.” 

Click here to view the exhibition: https://services.nwu.ac.za/gallery/raconteur

NWU gallery curator, Amohelang Mohajane.