BIOGRAPHY

Miné Kleynhans is an emerging artist and creative professional from Bloemfontein. As an artist, art project manager and facilitator Miné has participated in various developmental and often large scale international creative programs. Most notably she participated as a lead artist in collaboration with Alex Rinsler in the It’s My City project (www.itsmycity.co.za) in 2016. Miné graduated with her Master in Fine Art (Cum Laude) from the University of the Free State in 2017 and was an artist in residence at Brashnar Creative project, Macedonia, during 2018. She is currently employed at the UFS Art Gallery.

Her artistic practise is dedicated to uncovering and conveying perceived social narratives, rituals and shared dispositions in a manner that express inclinations toward the mystical and absurd. To this end her artworks employ humour and satire to tease out the rich intersections between magical thinking, ritual, religion, consumer culture, personal and collective fantasies and game playing.

Recently her work has revisited the beguilement of childhood toys, puzzles and games through interactions that often invite touch, manipulation and movement. A development from these explorations is that games and toys not only serve as references, but increasingly, guide the artmaking process itself – an artwork’s final form is determined by a set of game-like rules and prescriptions that attempt to translate interactions into structures and images. Playing at the fantasy that everyday experiences could be charged with mystical underpinnings these artworks conjure recollections of arcane rites and divinatory practises.