Ivan Vladislavic

Ivan Vladislavic was born in 1957 and lives in Johannesburg. He has published four books of fiction, ›Missing Persons, ›The Folly‹, ›Propaganda by Monuments‹ and ›The Restless Supermarket‹. A new fiction called ›The Exploded View‹ is due in November 2004. This was written in response to artworks by Joachim Schönfeldt, and selections from the text form part of a joint exhibition, ›The Model Men‹.

The writer’s major current work is a series of short texts on Johannesburg streets collectively titled ›Portrait with keys‹. Sequences of these have been published with the photographs of David Goldblatt in ›Fifty-One Years‹ (MACBA, 2001) and Roger Palmer in ›Overseas‹ (Fotohof, 2004), preparatory to their appearance in book form. He is also preparing an essay on the work of the artist Willem Boshoff.

Vladislavic began his editing career at Ravan Press in the 1980s and has since worked with many of South Africa’s major writers. His own edited publications include ›Ten Years of Staffrider‹ (with Andries Oliphant), an anthology of work from the magazine; and ›blank_Architecture, apartheid and after‹ (with Hilton Judin), which accompanied the exhibition of the same title commissioned by the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. This exhibition was seen in Berlin in 1999. He also edited ›T’kama-Adamastor: Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting‹, a book of essays on a monumental narrative canvas by Cyril Coetzee.

He was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 1999.