PROGRAMME OVERVIEW
LECTURES, PRESENTATIONS & WORKSHOPS
Lectures
Drinking deeply from the Imaginal Well, by Stephen Anthony Farah
Francis Bacon and the Brutality of Fact, by Cyril Coetzee
Symptom and Symbol: Wild Psychoanlysis, by Peter Merritt Dobey
Francis Bacon and the Brutality of Fact, by Cyril Coetzee
Symptom and Symbol: Wild Psychoanlysis, by Peter Merritt Dobey
Interactive Workshops
Persistence of Memory
The Brutality of Fact
The Weight of Light
Landscapes of the Soul
Reflections (Closing Session)
Artisit Vignettes
Coming home to the Stranger,
by Athi-Patra Ruga
Paradox Sympatico,
by Sue Pam-Grant
by Athi-Patra Ruga
Paradox Sympatico,
by Sue Pam-Grant
FACULTY
Stephen Anthony Farah, MA is the co-founder and Head
of Learning and Research at The Centre for Applied Jungian Studies.
Stephen is the past co-Chair of the International
Association of Jungian Studies and served on the IAJS Executive Board for nine
years. Stephen holds an honours degree in analytical philosophy from the
University of the Witwatersrand and a master’s degree in Jungian and Post
Jungian Studies from the University of Essex.
Stephen’s areas of interest include psychoanalysis, film, psychoeducation, consciousness, individuation, and Future Studies. His published papers include ‘True Detective and Jung’s Four Steps of Transformation’ published in ‘The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies’ (2018) and ‘The Freak: in Search of Jung’s second Personality’, in the anthology ‘The Spectre of the Other in Jungian Psychoanalysis: Political, Psychological and Sociological Perspectives’, (Routledge 2022) which Stephen co-edited.
Stephen’s areas of interest include psychoanalysis, film, psychoeducation, consciousness, individuation, and Future Studies. His published papers include ‘True Detective and Jung’s Four Steps of Transformation’ published in ‘The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies’ (2018) and ‘The Freak: in Search of Jung’s second Personality’, in the anthology ‘The Spectre of the Other in Jungian Psychoanalysis: Political, Psychological and Sociological Perspectives’, (Routledge 2022) which Stephen co-edited.
Cyril Coetzee - Senior Lecturer of Art History &
Esoteric Science at the The Centre for Applied Jungian Studies.
Cyril is a portrait artist and has painted both informal and
commissioned portraits throughout his career, including the portrait of Nelson
Mandela, which was used for the international stamp commemorating Mandela’s
90th birthday. He has served as a Fine Art lecturer at Port Elizabeth
Technikon, as an Art History lecturer at University of the Witwatersrand and
has been invited to give various lectures on Art History and on his own work in
South Africa, England, Switzerland, the United States and Canada. His works are
included in various public and private collections worldwide, including the
Royal Ontario Museum, Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Standard Bank in London and
the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
In 1996 he was commissioned by the University of the Witwatersrand to paint a 28 square meter canvas for the William Cullen Library, an internationally renowned archive, for the 75th celebrations of the University, which was unveiled by Judge Goldstone in 1999. Awards won include the: Helgaard Steyn Award (2003) and the Vita Art Award (1993).
Coetzee has exhibited internationally and was invited to hold solo retrospective exhibitions at the University of South Africa Gallery, Pretoria, and the Getrude Posel Gallery at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 1993. See more.
In 1996 he was commissioned by the University of the Witwatersrand to paint a 28 square meter canvas for the William Cullen Library, an internationally renowned archive, for the 75th celebrations of the University, which was unveiled by Judge Goldstone in 1999. Awards won include the: Helgaard Steyn Award (2003) and the Vita Art Award (1993).
Coetzee has exhibited internationally and was invited to hold solo retrospective exhibitions at the University of South Africa Gallery, Pretoria, and the Getrude Posel Gallery at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 1993. See more.
Peter Merritt Dobey trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Ireland and underwent his own psychoanalytic training analyses in both Ireland and France within the tradition of the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan. His background encompasses contemporary art and art criticism, and he continues to work as both an artist and writer. Extensive travel and a lifelong engagement with the arts have profoundly shaped his thinking and the foundations of his practice.
Since the age of twenty, Dobey has been mentored by the renowned French artist Christian Boltanski, whose influence reinforced the intimate relationship between artistic practice, personal life, and the unconscious. Dobey believes that his unconventional educational background and lifelong immersion in the arts have given him a distinctive understanding of the creative process and the psychological lives of artists.
Dobey's practice is rooted in the Lacanian understanding that every individual is radically subjective and guided by the particularity of their own desire. Dissatisfied with the limitations of many contemporary therapeutic approaches, he chose to practice as a life coach, allowing him the flexibility to work within the evolving tradition of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Rather than offering advice or diagnoses, he helps individuals discover and articulate the language of their own unconscious, recognising that each analytic process is unique to the person undertaking it.
See more.
Since the age of twenty, Dobey has been mentored by the renowned French artist Christian Boltanski, whose influence reinforced the intimate relationship between artistic practice, personal life, and the unconscious. Dobey believes that his unconventional educational background and lifelong immersion in the arts have given him a distinctive understanding of the creative process and the psychological lives of artists.
Dobey's practice is rooted in the Lacanian understanding that every individual is radically subjective and guided by the particularity of their own desire. Dissatisfied with the limitations of many contemporary therapeutic approaches, he chose to practice as a life coach, allowing him the flexibility to work within the evolving tradition of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Rather than offering advice or diagnoses, he helps individuals discover and articulate the language of their own unconscious, recognising that each analytic process is unique to the person undertaking it.
See more.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Sue Pam-Grant is a practicing transdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, director and performer/actor. She is represented by Axis Gallery, Manhattan, New York. She has an honorary Doctorate in Psychosocial Intervention and a Master’s degree in Fine Art (with distinction) in transdisciplinary drawing as an expanded drawing practice, with a particular lens in the psychoanalytic field of uncovering the authentic self through the creative process of manifesting and making. She has been practicing in her distinct field for the past twenty-five years.
Sue Pam-Grant views her transdisciplinary practice as processual. For her, the acts of painting, of drawing, of writing are all performances of the line. When she embraces writing and bookmaking she crosses the divide in art criticism between writing and performing: Writing is of the mind; performance is of the body; writing is private, performance is public. When a woman artist overleaps this distinction and sees disciplines as interrelating, she breaks down disciplines. As the French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous suggests in the title of her influential book, The Laugh of the Medusa, this type of feminine / feminist irruption is a Dionysian laugh at Apollonian order.
Sue Pam-Grant views her transdisciplinary practice as processual. For her, the acts of painting, of drawing, of writing are all performances of the line. When she embraces writing and bookmaking she crosses the divide in art criticism between writing and performing: Writing is of the mind; performance is of the body; writing is private, performance is public. When a woman artist overleaps this distinction and sees disciplines as interrelating, she breaks down disciplines. As the French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous suggests in the title of her influential book, The Laugh of the Medusa, this type of feminine / feminist irruption is a Dionysian laugh at Apollonian order.
Similarly, practice transects the psychoanalytic boundary between Self and Other. For Sue Pam-Grant, most influential among the many artists who have drawn upon psychoanalysis is Louise Bourgeois. Bourgeois, who was in psychoanalysis for thirty-five years until her therapist died, said that art gave her direct access to her subconscious, like a parallel form of psychoanalysis. For Sue Pam-Grant, when art, an interdisciplinary practice, meets the intersubjective practice of psychoanalysis, the private and personal become public and take material form. She moves fluidly between visual art, performance, theatre, film, and text.
See more.
See more.
Athi-Patra Ruga is a South African artist whose transdisciplinary practice coalesces performance, video, tapestry, painting, and sculpture.
Born ten years before South Africa’s first democratic elections, Ruga’s earlier work engaged with what 1994 meant for his generation. His work emerges from a generational experience of being raised within a hopeful miasma surrounding democratic transition, only to encounter the complex realities of post-apartheid South Africa.
This foundation has grown into an exploration of precarity, place and identity through practices of world-making and self-invention, evolving to fundamentally centre queer, femme and Black experiences. The creation of Azania, a fictional world that began as a critique of post-apartheid nationalism, represents Ruga’s most sustained engagement with mythology. As a world-building project, the work explores Xhosa mythology while also being rooted in questions of belonging and displacement, where Azania functions as both a critique and a utopia.
Performance and the performative, which Ruga describes as “a sense of immediacy and stepping into space”, are foundational to his practice. Yet performance, while immediate, is also paradoxically the most abstract medium in his work. Within his practice, he highlights processes of craftmaking, viewing craftsmen as inherently rebellious figures. His commitment to craftsmanship represents both material lineage and political resistance, connecting him to traditions of making that counter dominant narratives of production and value.
Ruga’s practice is entangled in paradox and productive tensions with an approach that is inherently protean, constantly evolving across mediums and engaging with the “trans” – transformation, transience, transgression – as a movement that allows for a radical exploration of self.
See more.
Born ten years before South Africa’s first democratic elections, Ruga’s earlier work engaged with what 1994 meant for his generation. His work emerges from a generational experience of being raised within a hopeful miasma surrounding democratic transition, only to encounter the complex realities of post-apartheid South Africa.
This foundation has grown into an exploration of precarity, place and identity through practices of world-making and self-invention, evolving to fundamentally centre queer, femme and Black experiences. The creation of Azania, a fictional world that began as a critique of post-apartheid nationalism, represents Ruga’s most sustained engagement with mythology. As a world-building project, the work explores Xhosa mythology while also being rooted in questions of belonging and displacement, where Azania functions as both a critique and a utopia.
Performance and the performative, which Ruga describes as “a sense of immediacy and stepping into space”, are foundational to his practice. Yet performance, while immediate, is also paradoxically the most abstract medium in his work. Within his practice, he highlights processes of craftmaking, viewing craftsmen as inherently rebellious figures. His commitment to craftsmanship represents both material lineage and political resistance, connecting him to traditions of making that counter dominant narratives of production and value.
Ruga’s practice is entangled in paradox and productive tensions with an approach that is inherently protean, constantly evolving across mediums and engaging with the “trans” – transformation, transience, transgression – as a movement that allows for a radical exploration of self.
See more.
