Pressing Against Apartheid: An Homage to Medu Art Ensemble

PUBLISHING LABO*R / Pressing Against Apartheid, invites you to scan, print, copy, edit and publish collectively.

“For me as a craftsman, the act of creating art should complement the act of creating shelter for my family or liberating the country for my people. This is culture.” – Thami Mnyele

Pressing Against Apartheid is a study in printing and art as tools of political struggle inspired by the work of Medu Art Ensemble. Through a series of public screen printing workshops, participants are invited to produce and distribute prints on paper and textiles. Rüzgâr Buşki will develop designs, often collaborating with other artists, to blend Medu's aesthetics with contemporary themes, thereby linking the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa to global struggles. The idea of these open screen printing workshops is to eliminate the divide between artists and non-artists. Screen printing is accessible to everyone, allowing participants to engage in the process and take home their printed works. This approach challenges the notion that art and prints are simply commodities for sale, instead promoting them as expressions of solidarity and community building. The ultimate goal is to nurture collective healing and togetherness through this shared artistic experience.

RÜZGAR BUŞKI’s works tackle body and identity as social constructs, self as a futuristic landscape and human condition as a subject of deconstruction. Their assemblages of self-community-society alter the routines of everyday life with irony and humour and hold possibilities for a sudden change in the unknown. Proposing affective maps of queer belongings and kinship by focusing on certain experiences in which the duality of individual and collective dissolves. Fear or happiness, celebration or mourning, longing, desire, resistance, or solidarity become the themes of their works for delivering survival strategies to alter given human conditions as well as to shed light on communities that flourished out of the normative order. They use several printing techniques including lithography and woodcut and work in diverse mediums such as photography, video, and film. In their body of work, the chosen technique is the main source of action to determine or explore further the theme.