Announcing the Social Impact Arts Prize 2022 Awarded Projects

The Environment is changing fundamentally every day between sunrise and sunset as climate changes. Greenland’s ice shelves are melting, Europe’s rivers are drying up, and the American West is on fire. Is there a place for artists and their aesthetic practices to engage, reflect or imagine a better world? How do artists engage with a topic perceived as abstract, distant, and complex without despair, dread or hopelessness? The answer is an emphatic yes, according to the artists who have submitted their ideas in the second cycle of the Rupert Museum’s Social Impact Arts Prize.

The entries came from all across Southern Africa. Artists, designers, architects, writers, poets, psychologists, gardeners, and beekeepers. Rivers, rain and clean water. Forests, foraging, speaking with trees and building bird paths. Photosynthesis, photography and recording ghost stories of long-gone fauna and flora are just some forms of these artistic responses.

These are the ten awarded projects with their lead artists, in no particular order:
Pollinator Pathways – Doreen Gowans
E’PLAZINI – Mpumelelo Buthelezi
Listening Garden – lo Makandal
A Still Life – Taryn Millar, Sarah Cairns and Aarti Shah, in collaboration with Hannelie Coetzee
The Orange River Project – Nina Barnett, Sinethemba Twalo and Amy Watson
Doba-Dash – Space Salad Studios
Kammakamma – Abri de Swardt
two tempests (for the river that swallowed its mouth) – Bettina Malcomess
Women from the Winterveld: Hands Become Voices for Our Planet – Women artists from Mapula Embroideries
Terroir – Georgia Munnik, Larissa Johnson and Chanelle Adams (Artist Residency in Graaff-Reinet).

We invite you to follow their progress on our social media platforms and attend the gala exhibition at the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch on 1 December 2022. Come see the projects in real life and be inspired by these larger-than-real artists.

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