Joni Brenner

IMPACT

Origins Museum, Wits University, Johannesburg
The Exhibition runs till June 2025

Presented is Brenner’s in-depth artistic response to a scientific subject - the 2.5 to 2.8 million year - old Taung skull. Encapsulating her long term engagement with the skull, the work on display broadly explores fragility and survival, destruction and creation, uncertainty, loss, pressure and chance. Raymond Dart’s description of the Taung skull eventually effected a profound re-ordering of knowledge and changed the way human evolution is thought about and understood, enabling scientists to locate our human origins in Africa.

Brenner is Principal Tutor in History of Art at the Wits School of Arts, where she has taught since 1999. She exhibited with Art First from 2005 - 2019.

> At the Still Point, 2015, Art First, London
> Unavoidable, 2011, Art First, London

Joni Brenner giving a talk at the exhibition The Taung Skull Installation view of the bronze skulls and large waterolours of skulls