Artworks Committee

Last updated: 18 April 2024

The Artworks Committee of the Constitutional Court Trust (CCT) decides on artwork donation proposals, and oversees the curation, conservation and other matters pertaining to the CCAC. The Committee is chaired by a judge of the Constitutional Court and also includes 1-2 other judges of the Court, together with four external experts and emeritus members who generously volunteer their time. The Justices ensure that the CCAC aligns with the Constitution and the work of the Court, whilst the external members bring visual arts and other expertise to the Committee.

The curatorial team reports and presents to the Committee.

See the current trustees of the CCT here.

Justice Nonkosi Mhlantla (Chairperson)
Justice Nonkosi Mhlantla obtained her BProc at the University of Limpopo in 1987. Prior to her appointment to the bench of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in December 2015, Justice Mhlantla served as a judge of the Eastern Cape High Court from 2002 until 2008, judge of the Competition Appeal Court from 2005 to 2008, acting judge at the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) from 2007 until November 2008, and was appointed as a judge of the SCA in 2009 where she served until November 2015. She is the current chairperson on the Constitutional Court Trust, joined the Artworks Committee in 2016 and became chairperson late 2021.

Justice Zukisa Tshiqi
JusticeZukisa Laurah Lumka Tshiqi was born on 11 January 1961 in Qingana, a small area in the Eastern Cape. Tshiqi views her father as a contributor to her resolve to work hard as his drive influenced her life and subsequent determination. She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand where she obtained a B Proc degree in 1989, and an Advanced Diploma in Labour Law from Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg) in 2001. She was a legal coordinator of the South African Council of Churches from 1986 to 1989. In 1991 she completed her articles of clerkship at Neluheni Attorneys of Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal and was subsequently admitted as an attorney of the High Court. Tshiqi was appointed as a Professional Assistant at Matlala Attorneys in Gauteng in 1991, where she worked on a broad spectrum of legal matters. In 1992 she was appointed as the Litigation Officer and Trial Advocacy Trainer of the Black Lawyers Associations. From 1994 to 2005 she operated her own legal practice while simultaneously working as a Senior Commissioner of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) and the Bargaining Councils. Tshiqi is a qualified trainer, facilitator, and mediator, and trains on an ad hoc basis for the South African Judicial Institute. From 2003 to 2004 she was an Acting Judge of the High Court and the Labour Court. In 2005 she was appointed as a Judge of the High Court. In 2007 she became Acting Judge at the Competition Appeal Court and in 2009 she was appointed as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal where she presided over many matters for 10 years before her appointment to the Constitutional Court. Tshiqi was appointed to the Constitutional Court in 2019. She joined the Artworks Committee late 2021. (Source)

Justice Steven Majiedt
Justice Steven Arnold Majiedt is a current Justice of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of South Africa. He was appointed in 2019, leaving his seat at the Supreme Court of Appeal, where he was first appointed in 2010. Prior to this, Justice Majiedt was an advocate at the Northern Cape Society of Advocates, before his first judicial appointment at the Northern Cape High Court in Kimberley in 2000. Justice Majiedt’s practising career was characterised by significant political work, and his ethos is primarily centred on advocating for the voiceless. During Justice Majiedt’s time as a judge he has ruled on matters both complex and controversial – ranging from international criminal law to the interpretation of statutory licensing requirements. He joined the Artworks Committee in 2024. (Source and further background)

Pfunzo Sidogi (external)
Pfunzo Sidogi is an NRF-rated Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Fine and Studio Arts at the Tshwane University of Technology. He is Chairperson of the Sasol New Signatures Art Competition and serves on the councils of the South African Visual Arts Historians Association and the Association of Arts Pretoria. His latest books are Mihloti Ya Ntsako: Journeys with the Bongi Dhlomo Collection (Pretoria: Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, 2022), co-winner of the ‘Best Non-Fiction: Monograph’ at the 2023 Humanities and Social Sciences Book, Creative Collection, Digital Contributions Awards, and The De-Africanization of African Art: Towards Post-African Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2022), which he co-edited with Denis Ekpo. He joined the Artworks Committee in a voluntary capacity in 2023.

Stacey Vorster (external)
Stacey Vorster is a lecturer, curator and PhD Researcher currently based at the University of Amsterdam. From 2012–2016 she was the curator of the CCAC. This experience shaped the topic of her PhD in Cultural Analysis, which takes the relationships between art and justice to explore curatorial possibilities in post-apartheid South Africa. Vorster completed an MA in History of Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2012, where she researched curatorial practice in contemporary African art. She has worked at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, where she initiated archival and research projects, and curated exhibitions including Pedagogy (2011). Previously she worked on a number of public art projects at the Trinity Session in Johannesburg with Marcus Neustetter and Stephen Hobbs. Her research interests include post- and de-colonial theory, human rights, ethics, curating and exhibition histories, trauma and memory, museum and archival theory and practice. She has been part of the Artworks Committee in a voluntary capacity since end 2016.

Tiffany de Waynecourt-Steele (external)
Tiffany de Waynecourt-Steele is a South African barrister and UK solicitor with an art law practice in Geneva, Switzerland. She read a Bachelor of Civil Law and a Master of Philosophy (with distinction) at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. Before that, she studied law at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. She was a law clerk on the first bench of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, clerking for Justice Zak Yacoob between 1998–1999. Prior to practicing at the Bar in Johannesburg from 2005 to 2008, she was a staff attorney at the Claims Resolution Tribunal in Zurich, adjudicating the claims of victims of the holocaust to Swiss Bank accounts. That position was preceded by an internship at UNHCR, London. She returned to Switzerland in 2008, where she worked in international commercial arbitration as well as in private client at various Swiss-based law firms including Baker & McKenzie and Anaford Attorneys. In 2019, she founded a law practice based in Geneva, focused on the intersection of private client law, art law transactions and disputes. Tiffany is a professional advisor to the international art market and a member of the Art Law Foundation in Geneva. She joined the Artworks Committee in a voluntary capacity in 2021.

Tshegofatso Mabaso (external)
Tshegofatso Mabaso is a curator, researcher and artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. She is currently the curator of contemporary art at the Iziko South African National Gallery. Mabaso holds an MA in Art History. In her practice, she is interested in experimental approaches to knowledge production, exploring new curatorial methods and imagining new forms, whether for exhibitions, collections, or institutions. Collaboration influences her thinking, drawing on the wealth of knowledge and approaches collectives have offered us historically. Notable recent projects include The Art of Lithography: A Collaborative Expression of LL Editions (2018) at Wits Art Museum; the Minding Our Business podcast (2018/2019) in collaboration with VANSA; and counting (2019) at Johannesburg Art Gallery. Mabaso joined the Artworks Committee in a voluntary capacity in 2021.

Catherine Kennedy (ex officio)
Catherine Kennedy works as an archival, civil society and cultural consultant. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Library and Information Studies (UCT) and a University of KwaZulu Natal (Pietermaritzburg) Bachelor of Arts degree. She has been working as the trust manager of the Constitutional Court Trust since 2018 and currently consults for the Javett Foundation, a philanthropic organisation which focuses on education, culture and the arts. Kennedy was the director of the South African History Archive from 2009 to 2016, served on the board of GALA, a queer activist archive from 2009–2020, and joined the board of the Javett Art Center at the University of Pretoria in 2020. She has provided short term archival consultancy in various conflict and post-conflict contexts over the past decade, and currently consults on a human rights archive project in Zimbabwe. She joined the Artworks Committee ex officio in 2018.

A member emeritus is nominated and elected by the Artworks Committee in recognition of having served the Committee with distinction as a current or former member of the Committee who has served for at least eight years and made significant contributions through volunteer or advocacy activities.

Justice Albie Sachs (retired)
Justice Albie Sachs completed BA LLB at the University of Cape Town and later a PhD at the University of Sussex. Sachs started his law career as an advocate at the Cape Bar in 1957. After being detained in solitary confinement for two long spells for his anti-apartheid activism, he went into exile in 1966. During 11 years helping to build a new legal system in newly independent Mozambique, he became deeply involved with the arts community and the production of public murals there. He was a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the ANC and took an active part in the negotiations which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. He served as a judge at the Constitutional Court of South Africa between 1994–2009. He and former Justice Yvonne Mokgoro played a seminal role in the development of the Constitutional Court building and the CCAC, forming part of the then Architectural Artworks Programme Committee that steered the artistic interventions that distinguishes this building. Sachs became member emeritus in 2021 and remains continually dedicated to the promotion of the CCAC.

Justice Edwin Cameron (retired)
Justice Edwin Cameron attended Stellenbosch University where he obtained a BA Law and an Honours degree in Latin. He lectured in Latin and Classical Studies before studying as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he obtained a BA in Jurisprudence and a BCL. Cameron received his LLB from the University of South Africa. Cameron practised at the Johannesburg Bar from 1983 to 1994. From 1986 he was a human rights lawyer based at Wits University's Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS), where he was awarded a personal professorship in law. In 1994 he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela as an acting judge of the High Court. He was appointed permanently to the Witwatersrand Local Division in 1995. In 1999, Cameron was given an acting stint on the Constitutional Court, and later appointed to the Supreme Court of Appeal where he served for eight years. Cameron served on the Constitutional Court bench from 2009 to 2019. He is a HIV/AIDS and LGBTI activist. Cameron is currently appointed as the inspecting judge of correctional services and serves as Chancellor of Stellenbosch University and as a trustee of the Constitutional Court Trust. He served on the Artworks Committee as member from 2010 until he became member emeritus in 2021.

Carol Steinberg SC
Carol Steinberg is an advocate at the Johannesburg Bar. Before being called to the Bar in 2006, she worked in arts and culture as a playwright, academic, and activist. She has numerous published plays and academic articles about South African theatre, and was a founding member of the Performing Arts Workers Equity. Carol was a senior member of the national Department of Arts and Culture at its inception in 1994 and was later advisor to the Minister of Arts and Culture. She was involved from the year 2000 as member of the then Architectural Artworks Programme Committee that steered the artistic interventions that distinguishes the Constitutional Court building, and remained actively involved as voluntary member of the Artworks Committee up to 2021, at which point she became member emeritus.

Prof Karel Nel
Karel Nel worked closely with Albie Sachs from 1997 on the CCAC prior to the building of the Constitutional Court and joined the then Architectural Artworks Programme Committee in 2000. He remained actively involved as voluntary member of the Artworks Committee up to 2021, at which point he became member emeritus. He studied Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; St Martin's School of Art, London, and the University of California, Berkeley. He currently lives and works in Johannesburg as an artist and curator. Nel has completed numerous artist residencies, commissions, publications, and exhibitions both locally and internationally over four active decades. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and the British Museum, London as well as in Southern African museums and corporate and private art collections. In 2004, Nel was appointed as the resident artist of COSMOS, an international consortium of astronomers mapping a two square degree field of the universe, and in 2012 he participated in African Cosmos, Stellar Arts: African Cultural Astronomy from Antiquity to the Present at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C. In 2017, his work was included in South Africa: the art of the nation exhibition at the British Museum. Nel served as Associate Professor at the School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand until 2017. In 2018 he took up the post of Senior Adjunct Curator at the newly-opened Norval Foundation in Cape Town. Here he has curated major retrospective exhibitions of the work of Sydney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae, Eduardo Villa, David Goldblatt, the sculpture of William Kentridge and of Jackson Hlungwani.

Janina Masojada
Janina Masojada studied for her Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Natal and obtained her Masters of Architecture at MIT in Boston, USA in 1989. Masojada was a founding partner of designworkshop:sa, the Durban-based architectural design practice, alongside business partner Andrew Makin, who won the international competition held for the design of the new Constitutional Court building, as awarded by President Nelson Mandela in 1998. The scope of their appointment included the masterplan and urban design of Constitution Hill, and both the architecture and interior fit-out of the Court. As an extension of the design objectives, Masojada led the collaborative and inclusionary design development process and integration of work by artists and craftspersons into the fabric of the building, recognised as forming part of the CCAC. The team have received several national and international accolades, with Awards of Excellence for the Court, the highest level of acknowledgment from the South African Institute of Architects, in addition to development, hospitality, residential and commercial projects. No longer active in architectural practice, Masojada continues her involvement with the visual arts and creative processes. After serving the Artworks Committee, also the Constitutional Court's Building Committee, in a voluntary capacity for many years, she became member emeritus in 2021.

Other former members of the artworks committee include:

• Justice Sisi Khampepe (former chairperson 2015 - 2021)
• Justice Johann van der Westhuizen (former chairperson 2010 - 2015)
• Melissa Goba (CCAC curator 2016 - 2018; external member 2018 - 2022)