The recipients of SAAWCA’s Critics Mentorship Programme 2013 are
Sakhiziwe Gcina and Murray Kruger. Gcina is a third-year student in Film and
Media at the University of Cape Town and he will be mentored by Matthew Krouse,
the arts editor at the Mail & Guardian.
“Being
an arts journalist, critic and media professional is challenging and demanding.
The field is fiercely competitive and dynamic. Given these pressures one has to
be not only passionate about art journalism, but should be exposed to these stresses
in the media industry early in their training,” observed Gcina.
Kruger is an artist and curator, completing his masters in Fine Arts at
Wits University. He will be mentored by
Mary Corrigall, the Books Editor and Senior Feature Writer at the Sunday
Independent.
“My primary interest is to look deeper into the
implied relationships between performance and these respective modes of
production, ideally laying the foundation for a workable multi-modal practice
that does not privilege one of these particular disciplines. I see this 2013 Critics
Mentorship Programme as a structured context within which to return to arts
writing.”
After spending the month of June under the guidance of
Krouse and Corrigall, Gcina and Kruger will travel to the National Arts
Festival where they will write and publish reports on the festival. This is the
second year that the Critics Mentorship Programme has been running. This year
it has been funded by the Goethe-Institut. This support has allowed the
programme to be expanded to include two candidates.
The programme was initiated by Corrigall, the head and
founder of SAAWCA, in an attempt to encourage and nurture new arts writers
and critics.
