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01 October 2019
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Story Xolisa Mnukwa
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Photo Xolisa Mnukwa
From the left; Gift Taku, 2019 Doty winner; Reabetswe Mabine, Doty Coordinator Tshepo Zweni, first runner-up and Jacobeth Selinga, second runner-up
The votes have been tallied, and after much deliberation, the UFS is proud to announce Gift Taku as the winner of the 2019 KovsieGear Designer of the Year (DOTY) Competition!
Tshepo Zwane and Jacobeth Selinga won second and third place respectively, with innovative designs that complied with the assessment requirements, based on originality of the design, adherence to the brand guidelines, creativity, and other criteria.
Gift’s design triumphed with 845 votes on the UFS KovsieLife webpage, as well as in the presentation in front of a judging panel.
Since 2016, KovsieGear has been discovering local (UFS staff and students) graphic designers and giving them a platform to showcase their work through DOTY, which runs annually. The aim of the competition is to support local talent by giving entrants an opportunity to come up with creative designs that are unique to the university and which will be used on limited-edition apparel in the store, as well as getting featured in the KovsieGear catalogue.
The competition has since fashioned the best clothing-logo designs the university has ever seen and continues to motivate and empower students to make positive contributions to the Kovsie campus culture and brand.
For more information about DOTY contact Reabetswe Mabine at MabineR@ufs.ac.za
The winning design by Gift Taku:
I-DENT-I-TIES to shine at the Free State Arts Festival
2016-07-08
Erwin Maas with members of the student cast from the
Qwaqwa Campus. They are, from left: Mpho Xaba,
Lebohang Molefe and Tankiso Mofokeng.
Imagine this: A student cast from a rural campus; Production team consisting of a New York-based Dutch director, a South African screen and stage legend, a The Hague/Vienna-based Dutch theatre designer, and a Vienna-based Serbian performance-craft-artist and designer.
This sounds like a far-fetched flight of the imagination. But it is real and it is called ‘I-DENT-I-TIES’, a large-scale interdisciplinary performance project with international theatre professionals and students from the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Qwaqwa Campus.
According to the director of the project, Erwin Maas, the production explores the ‘dents’ and ‘ties’ of both individual and communal identification and distinctiveness and does this through the famous Basotho story of ‘Moshanyana Sankatana’ as a point of departure.
“We explore questions like ‘what are dents in our society as well as in ourselves’, ‘what ties me to who I really am and who I want to be’, ‘what does it mean to be me’, ‘what does it mean to be South African’,” said Maas, who has been working on this project since last year.
The production also celebrates personal, communal, and universal narratives and identities through song, dance, story-telling, and music. It explores the past, the present, and the future.
“This production will certainly reveal an extraordinary journey into what makes us unique and binds us together,” he added during the rehearsals that started in May at the Qwaqwa Campus.
Maas has teamed up with a well-known South African film and stage legend, Jerry Mofokeng, as consultant. Mofokeng, who introduced Maas to the ‘Sankatana’ story, has featured on a number of critically-acclaimed films that include ‘Cry, The Beloved Country’ as well as the Academy Award-winning ‘Tsotsi’. Maas has also worked with the Hague/Vienna-based Dutch designer Nico de Rooij and Djana Covic, a Vienna-based Serbian designer.
The production is a partnership between the UFS Student Affairs, Vrystaat Arts Festival, the Programme for Innovation in Artform Development, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands in South Africa. It will premiere at the Free State Arts Festival, held in Bloemfontein from 11 to 16 July 2016. This will be followed by a performance at the Qwaqwa Campus on 19 July 2016.