Konrad WELZ (b. 1967)
Cemetery Symmetry
2002
new media
4m 45s
Late At Night When The Malls Are Closed
1997
new media
11m 6s
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Pretoria, Konrad Welz is an artist, editor, cinematographer and director, who has an enduring passion for the moving image and sound.
He is a grandson of the South African artist Jean Welz (1900 – 1975).
Welz studied electrical engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand and became part of a collective called Vache Noire/Nkomo Mnyama (1986 – 1991), which ‘used music, performance, film, and general zaniness to subvert and bear, the Apartheid State in which [they] found [them]selves’. Around this time, he made some of the first examples of computer- and computer-generated art and music in South Africa.
Welz went on become a pioneer of video art in South Africa, showing many of his works locally and abroad. His pieces are lyrical and often dark recontextualisations of the world, created by taping excerpts from television transmissions and re-editing and remixing them.
In 1987, inspired by Jane Alexander’s photomontages of the early 1980s, Welz started creating rudimentary stop-motion animations of cut-out elements of photocopies of famous photos, which he combined with footage filmed from television, his rudimentary computer graphics, and choreographed scenes from around his parental home. Intent on recording a soundtrack, he had the good fortune of meeting Yunus and Iqbal Momoniat – pioneers of South African experimental, independent music. He recorded all his subsequent film soundtracks at their now long-defunct Velvet Tongue studio.
In 1989, he made the 8mm film Requiem: Architecture and Morality based on the architecture of the Apartheid State. It included plans of Black townships, like Soweto, to recordings from John Vorster Square, the police headquarters where many anti-Apartheid activists had been tortured and murdered. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison, starting the countdown to South Africa’s first democratic elections. In 1991, Architecture and Morality was purchased by the [Iziko] South African National Gallery. Along with a work by William Kentridge, it was among the first examples of film art ever bought by a South African public gallery.
He graduated with a Master’s degree in Fine Art from the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen in 1997. His work was shown on a number of video festivals in England and Germany in the late 1990s and was featured as part of Dreams and Clouds: Contemporary Art from South Africa, at the Konstmuseum in Gothenberg, Sweden in 1998.
He currently lives in Bracknell in the United Kingdom. When not making his own work, he works as CG generalist, video editor and sound mixer on various commercial and film art projects.