Sculpturing his way to the finals of the Sasol Art competition is DUT’s very own rising star artist Bongani Khanyile.

The BTech Fine Art student was announced as one of the top 10 finalists and merit award winners of the Sasol New Signatures competition, a national art competition, walking away with a cool R10 000 cash prize. This annual competition, established by the Association of Arts Pretoria in the late 1960s, is the longest running national art competition in South Africa. The competition has grown into one of the main competitions on the arts calendar in South Africa.

Today, winners (of the competition) are household names. Sasol New Signatures competition is unique in that it is the only competition for new artists, allowing them the opportunity to showcase their work for the first time. As a national competition, it holds several selection points from all provinces and each year there is a winner, a runner up and five merit award winners.

This year (2014), there were more than 500 entries and Sasol selected only 100 promising works to be exhibited at the Pretoria Arts Museum. From the 100 finalists, only seven were recognised as winners. The overall winner won a R100 000 prize and solo exhibition, the runner-up received R25 000 and the five merit award winners each won R10 000.
Khanyile was chosen as one of the merit award winners and was given the opportunity to showcase his ceramic helmets and received his prize of R10 000 at the Pretoria Arts Museum recently. “This year my work was recognised by the judges as the merit award winner. The winning process was amazing as Sasol exposed me to its internal and outside media and that placed a professional appeal to my career. The other privilege was that the exhibition held at the Pretoria Art Museum encompassed a professionally presented catalogue of all top 100 works,” he said excitedly.

Khanyile also expressed his excitement to be representing DUT at such a prestigious art competition. He also thanked his ceramics lecturer; Hendrik Stroebel, for his assistance in the process of producing of this work.

Talking about his winning ceramic helmets, he said he challenged the general conventional gaze on manual labourers who in South Africa are always perceived as subjects of labour. “My helmets express individualism. My work is a commentary on the generalisation of workers and it celebrates various goals, aspirations, taste and worldviews that exist individually within the working class.

Generally a helmet is a protective gear for the head. Here, it is used metaphorically to protect the labourer’s dignity from conventional gazes or stereotypical labelling,” he said.

He also added that this was a fruitful experience that he would never forget. “To be recognised on a national level as a merit award winner meant millions in my career and my historical life as a whole,” said Khanyile.
To add to his list of achievements, Khanyile has done a portrait for the Confucius Institute. Khanyile designed a portrait of Confucius which was given as a gift, from DUT, to Madam Xu Lin, Chief Executive Officer of the Confucius Institute Headquarters in Beijing. As a result of the splendid work he did when he designed the portrait, Khanyile participated in the Shanghai Summer School Programme in China in July this year (2014).

-Waheeda Peters
Pictured: Bongani Khanyile’s ceramic helmets. Also pictured is Khanyile during his trip to China in July this year (2014).