The Art of Individuation 2024

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer and former editor of frieze magazine who lives in London. Her recent books include The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit world and The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits. She is also the author of the novel Bedlam; author and illustrator of the children’s book There’s Not One; and editor of The Artist’s Joke. She has been a judge of the Paul Hamlyn Award, the Turner Prize, the John Moore’s Painting Prize, and a member of the advisory boards of Arts Council England, the British Council Venice Biennale Commission, the Contemporary Art Society and the Imperial War Museum Art Commissions Committee. In 2023, Jennifer was guest curator of the exhibition of contemporary and historic painting, Thin Skin at Monash University Art Museum in Melbourne. Jennifer is also the host of the National Gallery of Australia’s new podcast, Artist’s Artists.

Since leaving academic life Cyril Coetzee has been a full-time artist and has exhibited his paintings both locally and internationally. 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. A large format art book elaborating on the themes, the commissioning and related works was published (T’Kama-Adamastor: Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting, edited by Ivan Vladislavic, University of the Witwatersrand, 2000).
Coetzee has written a much-lauded monograph on the work of Harold Voigt, “The Poetry of Sight”, published in 2006.
Cyril Coetzee has a Master’s degree in Fine Art, and a BA Honour’s degree in English. To further his research into colour theory he has also studied at the Tobias School of Art in Sussex, and has done further courses at the Goetheanum Painting school in Dornach, Switzerland.
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. His portrait of Nelson Mandella was for the international stamp commemorating Mandela’s 90th birthday.
He has a lifelong interest in the study and teaching of Anthroposophy. In this programme Art of Individuation Coetzee brings his twin passions of aesthetics and spiritual science to bear in the individuating and initiatory school and practice of art.

Nico Athene is a multimedia artist working through embodiment as her primary medium. She facilitates workshops in embodiment and consent, and in dance, studying and teaching butoh and contact improvisation. Athene has degrees in Social Anthropology (BAUCT), Public Health (MPH, Edinburgh University) and Fine Art (MFA University of Witswatersrand), and has also trained as a family constellations facilitator, yoga teacher and birth doula.

Athene is a student of archetypes old and new, and is moved by the power of witnessing, exaggerating and deconstructing or retrieving them as a means to open space to access the ecological body-mind – working at the edge of the human and the known to reveal new archetypes for unprecedented times. This course was developed from her Fine Arts masters thesis ‘We Need New Archetypes’, which she researched over two years of intensive study, and completed 2022 with support of a post graduate grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. She has researched and taught it in various forms and workshops to mixed discipline students, including in Johannesburg to students at the University of Witwatersrand supported by the Centre for Human Rights and the Arts at Baard Colledge in the USA. Athene has exhibited and performed in various locations, including Kalashikovv Gallery (Johannesburg), Pretoria Art Museum (Pretoria), the Institute for Creative Arts and the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) (Cape Town), the Stevenson Gallery (Online), and the National Arts Festival (Makhanda).

Sinazo Chiya is an associate director at Stevenson and the author of 9 More Weeks, a book of interviews with artists. She has contributed to the publications Adjective, Art Africa and ArtThrob, and is among the 2019 writing fellows at the Institute of Creative Arts, University
of Cape Town. She was the editor of Uhambo luyazilawula, a monograph of Mawande Ka Zenzile’s work and her writing features in an upcoming publication by Penny Siopis, looking at the essay film. Most recently, she co-curated my whole body changed into something else, an exhibition taking place across Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg, focusing broadly on ideas around existence and transformation.

Maria Grazia Calzà grew up among the olive trees of Northern Italy. After a diploma in Art Restoration, she continued her studies at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Germany receiving a MA and later a PhD in Medieval History, Theology, and Psychology. She has written a book on the role of the body in the mysticism of the first Beguine, Marie d’Oignies, has published various articles and lectured internationally on the topic. She graduated from the International School of Analytical Psychology (ISAP) in Zurich. Dr. Calzà works at Lake Garda as a Philosophical Counselor and Jungian Psychoanalyst and is a co-founder of the Embodied Jung Conference.