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Javett-UP

@javett_up

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The Javett-UP is a place to feel at home, a place where our futures can be reimagined.
#ComeToJavettUP

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in advance.

It's been a challenging year, but we overcame so many obstacles that built our characters and strengthened the will to keep striving.
We proved the naysayers wrong. We proved to ourselves that we can actually do it again, and again.

Stay safe, stay positive, stay creating.
See you in 2026.

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String Theory is the central installation of my solo exhibition @javett_up curated by @stormjvr developed during my residency @cern @artsatcern with @prohelvetia

In a time when constructed systems and infrastructures are destroying the planet and humanity - what could it look like to build technologies and practices which expand our sensitivities?

Not just to invisible cosmic energies, but the stories, histories and experiences of those around us.

This body of work originated as an attempt to develop both technologies and spiritual practices to reconnect to lost ancestral knowledge and language.

Tracing my own ancestry, I realised that following its thread back into the past becomes a cosmological question.

I began building musical instruments which could access tonalities of sound which traced Afro-Asian migration patterns and histories, but which do not exist in western musical systems - as a way of exploring fundamental aspects of reality

At first this was a way for me to access sonic language outside of western colonial language in the hopes of understanding the world and myself in a more pure form.

It grew into a practice of making instruments of expanded perception in an age where technology has been designed to suppress our senses and subjugate us.

Cosmic Rays are invisible beams of energy travelling for light-years from all corners of the universe, constantly passing through us and our planet.

These distant signals originate from some of the same regions of space that created the elements which now form our planet and us. They are like threads
showing the interconnectedness of everything in the universe. #cern #quantumphysics #astronomy #art installation

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One of my favourite art galleries in my city...😍❤️

Thank you @javett_up for the invite, had a great time. Love this space so much. 🤏🏽

Imagine not being a creative?! Thank God that's not me. 😅😆 Fourth time viewing an exhibition at the Javett Art Centre.

...also guys, it's nice being a @universityofpretoria alumni. 😎

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Double exposure Pinhole photograph of @javett_up taken with a self-made camera.
Want to make your own camera? Join our pinhole workshop at Bathong this Saturday in Pretoria
You will make your own camera from a tin, take an image, and then develop the paper negative in our darkroom.
Date: Saturday, 03 October 2026
Time: 11:00 – 16:00
Place: Botaki Ba Afrika, Hatfield, Pretoria
Price: R400 per person (Max 20 participants)
Bookings: www.bathong.africa
Contact: Alet Pretorius (alet@bathong.co.za)
Note: All skill levels are welcome. The workshop is child-friendly (children must be accompanied by an adult). We also invite attendees to help grow our community creative library by donating any spare photography books or magazines
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What an absolute delight to visit Passage—a song, the current exhibition at Javett UP, with work from Akinbode Akinbiyi (UK/Nigeria) and Abrie Fourie (South Africa) The works are absolutely beautiful and the curation sublime.

“What happens when we listen to photographs instead of simply looking? And what stories emerge when images carry the quiet echoes of memory, history, and everyday life?

The traveling exhibition, Passage—a song, brings together the work of two Berlin-based artists - Akinbode Akinbiyi (UK/Nigeria) and Abrie Fourie (South Africa). It explores the connections between photography, sound, and political imagination and was developed during a joint residency in Burkina Faso, West Africa, in 2021. The body of work emerged from the photographers’ movements in the streets of the capital Ouagadougou and the surrounding landscapes of Oubritenga Province during a period of growing political uncertainty in the country.

Sharing an interest in place, memory, and listening, Akinbiyi and Fourie work independently yet in conversation with one another to capture the visual and acoustic landscapes they find themselves in. They slowly move through streets, markets, public spaces, and peripheral zones, capturing the everyday rhythms that shape the environments they pass through. Their photographs turn to the quieter details to everyday life, searching for traces of cultural memory, the enduring legacy of the revolutionary leader, Thomas Sankara, and collective histories that continue to resonate today.

The photographic works are in dialogue with a sound installation, echoing field recordings in Burkina Faso, and recordings from archival music collections in Ouagadougou. Visitors are invited to navigate the space much as the artists navigated the landscapes of Burkina Faso - through walking, observing, and listening.”

@javett_up
@akinbodeakinbiyi
@abraham_hercules_fourie

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The Gold Rhino of Mapungubwe – The Ballet

Join us for the University of Pretoria Principal’s Concert 2026, in collaboration with Mzansi Ballet.

Experience a spectacular fusion of music, dance and storytelling featuring nearly 200 performers, including the UP Symphony Orchestra, Tuks Camerata and the UP Ovuwa Cultural Ensemble.

Tickets: R350 - R550
Link in bio and go to UP's Principal Concert

Every ticket and merchandise purchase supports the #UPDegreesDelivered Campaign.

#UniversityOfPretoria #UPPrincipalConcert2026 #MzansiBallet #Mapungubwe

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Dear friends,

I am proud to share with you my first Museum solo-exhibition String Theory, opened last week at the @javett_up curated by @stormjvr

Thank you to everyone who came to the opening, and who has supported this process for the past 10 years.

At the heart of this exhibition is a working particle physics experiment as art installation. Whenever a cosmic ray strikes the atmosphere above the installation, the strings of my instruments begin to vibrate through electromagnetic fields.

Although there is some heavy science behind this exhibition, really it’s about expanding our awareness to the lost and forgotten songs of the universe.

Not just invisible cosmic energies, but lost ancestral languages, knowledges, histories and stories that constellate our lives on earth and give meaning to what it means to be human.

I’ve always understood art in the spirit of the Greek “Techne”, the root word of “Technology” meaning art or craft. So by definition Technology means knowledge of art, knowledge of craft.

Indeed when traced backwards through time our most advanced technologies of today stem from ancient art and craft traditions. Yet today the dominant voices in the development of technologies which have the greatest impact on human culture and society too often do not include artists.

I developed the works in this exhibition to function as spiritual technologies. I hope that those who get to experience this show are reminded of the essence of who we all are and our of our connection to each other, the planet and other sentient beings.

This project was intensely inspired by the history and spirit of Wayfinding, which has many parallels to how I practice and is currently being revived and pioneered by the Polynesian Voyaging society @hokuleacrew

This work is the culmination of my project “If Spacetime were a Canvas” started @artsatcern @cern with @prohelvetia @prohelvetia_johannesburg @defunctcontext

Self Portrait as a Nightsky (2026) - 24-hour Cosmic Ray exposure, jacquard binary weave, custom algorithmic encoding, hair and other collected objects, copper sitar string, overtone flute

150 x 300cm
Special Edition 1/3 in Darkstar Tapestry series

Clos

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CULTURE IS JUST A LANGUAGE by Ynot Tony

For the last four or five years, I’ve been pretty quiet when it comes to actually making my own work. I was still creating, still working, still making things, but most of my world became printmaking. Paper, editions, processes… and somewhere along the way, I kind of stepped away from painting and working on canvas.

So I guess this is me coming back to that part of myself. My name is Tony Maphosa, but creatively, I’m YNOT TONY. And I’m still figuring out exactly what that means, because I don’t think being an artist is something you ever really finish figuring out. For me, a lot of it comes back to identity.

Who am I? Where do I come from? What have I inherited? And what parts of that do I actually choose for myself? I grew up between two different worlds. One side of my family was very religious, and the other side was very cultural.

And being somewhere in the middle, there was always this feeling that I had to understand both, respect both, and somehow carry both without disappointing either side. But at some point I started asking myself, why do I have to choose?

And if neither one completely speaks for me, then what does? That’s where this piece comes from. It’s called Culture Is Just a Language. For me, culture and religion are both languages that people use to understand life, but I’ve realised that I also need to find a language that feels truthful to me.

The jellyfish in the work represents a lot of that. It’s fragile, but it survives. It moves with its environment, but it still exists as itself. And the universe inside it represents how I’ve started to look at my own belief system. I believe in action. I believe that what you put into the world creates a reaction. If you put in the work, something is going to come from it.

If you don’t, nothing really changes. And I think that idea has slowly become part of how I see life, how I see people, and eventually how I see society. Because if we can question the things we inherit as individuals, maybe we can start questioning the kind of society we’re building together.

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Some moments behind the scenes in the making of my first solo exhibition, String Theory curated by @stormjvr at @javett_up

For the past nine years I have been exploring artistic and spiritual practice as technologies of expanded perception, and their relationship to science as an instrument for extending human sensitivity beyond the limits of normal senses.

This began, for me, with ancestry.

I became interested in what has been lost through the erasure of indigenous and diasporic languages, cultures and knowledge systems under colonialism. Not simply histories or traditions, but particular ways of perceiving and organising reality.

I think of culture and language like lenses that shape perception and observation and construct information in unique ways to make images of the world. Encoded within different languages and cultures are generations of observations, stories and ways of being which give us access to realities larger than any single worldview.

Reflecting on my own colonised educational upbringing, I began to wonder how separation from ancestral language might also produce separation from ancestral knowledge — from inherited ways of listening, sensing and understanding the world.

Music became one way of approaching this question.

I taught myself to play and to build, instruments not only to make music but to investigate how practices of listening and meditative states of consciousness could alter perception. I became interested in musical traditions in which sonic practice was inseparable from philosophical or spiritual inquiry: music as a means of entering into relation with something larger than oneself.

I handcrafted a unique family of stringed instruments designed to access frequencies of sound outside the dominant Western equal-tempered system. Building them became a way of reaching toward frameworks of perception latent within the places, histories and lineages from which I come…

@defunctcontext @prohelvetia @artsatcern

Where do I come from?

I realised that when we extend this question of ancestry out into the past, it becomes a cosmological question

I named these instruments Sūtras. In Sanskrit, sūtra means “thread”, and also refers t

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Invites have just gone out for String Theory, my collaboration with Kamil Hassim using cosmic ray detectors to actuate string instruments of his design and build.

My contribution was to design, develop, and build an interface between the cosmic ray detectors and a string oscillator, and to advise on other technical aspects pertinent to the exhibition set-up.

It has been quite involved, and all circuitry had to be designed from scratch. I was rather pleased that everything worked on first testing as I'd usually prefer to build different parts of a circuit on separate boards, to assure both flexibility and ease of testing. Here it had to be on the same board, which becomes tricky when stripboard is used and the circuit itself needs to remain attractive.

The coils that a third party had to wind sadly produced some headaches, but these have fortunately been corrected.

I'll post more about the actual build as time goes on.

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I was asked to call an imbizo for Cultural and Creative industries imbokodo. I called on friends and colleagues to recede into the backdrop so as to not clog the centre. Neli lead … the magic unfolded.

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What histories do we inherit, and what responsibility do we have to remember them?

In conversation with ART AFRICA, photographer Thero Makepe reflects on 'We Didn't Choose to Be Born Here', his first institutional solo exhibition at Javett Art Centre. Drawing together family photographs, oral histories, documentary images, staged portraiture, and re-enactments, Makepe traces his family's movements between Botswana and South Africa, revealing the intimate connections between personal memory and Southern Africa's histories of migration, colonialism, and political resistance.

Moving from Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness to the legacy of #FeesMustFall, the conversation considers photography as a form of historical inquiry, and remembering as both a personal responsibility and a collective act.

Read Full Interview on ART AFRICA.

#artafricamagazine #theromakepe #pretoriauniversity #javettartcentre #bostswana

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