15 Oct 2018

Artists looking to participate in the Botswana Telecommunication Corporation (BTC) phonebook cover competition and Thapong Artist of the Year Award (TAYA) have been called upon to be mindful of the October 21 submission deadline.

In an interview, Thapong Visual Arts Centre coordinator, Reginald Bakwena said a lot of the information regarding the phonebook cover competition and TAYA has been shared on official social media platforms and artists should read, understand and follow the laid out instructions.

He said they were expecting a lot of submissions for both competitions since the competitions were announced a month ago.

Bakwena also urged artists to take heed of comments and suggestions made by judges during previous installments of the competitions.

He said the phone book cover competition was open to junior and senior secondary schools as they wanted to discover and nurture talent.

“The guidelines clearly state that and we also do not want plagiarised computer work. We also realised that some of the work we have seen before was done by teachers and we do not want that,” he stressed.

Bakwena said they had undertaken awareness campaigns on what they wanted and also incorporated judges’ recommendations regarding the BTC phonebook cover competition.

He said they have had four awareness campaigns, while  posters for the competition have been out since the three year partnership from BTC was announced.

He said the guidelines for TAYA, which is only open to members’ of Thapong, have been posted on the centre’s Facebook page.

Bakwena said last year there were 117 participants for TAYA, while the year before they were around 100, adding that they want to increase the numbers this year.

“For the BTC phonebook cover competition we had 138 participants last year and we want to increase the numbers,” he said.

Bakwena further said artists needed to work on their concept development, craftsmanship and originality.

“Be unique in creativity and submit artworks that are attractive to look at and also have that wow factor,” he said, adding that artists needed to bring their A game to the competitions. ENDS