SAAWCA’s Critics Mentorship Programme 2013

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.