An historical appraisal of nigerian democratic experience
JoburgPavillion_CATALOG_lo_res
1.
2. Credits
Roelof Petrus van Wyk, Johannesburg
PhD Candidate, History of Art, Wits University.
Artist & Architect
Lucy MacGarry, Johannesburg
Joburg Art Fair Curator
Dr. Liese van der Watt, London
Independent Scholar
Natalie Dixon, Amsterdam
Mobile Ethnographer,
PhD Candidate New Media, Goldsmiths University, London
Lesley Lokko, Johannesburg
Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Johannesburg
Yvette Greslé, London
PhD Candidate, History of Art, University College London
Research Associate, FADA, University of Johannesburg
Mpho Moshe Matheolane, Johannesburg
PhD Candidate History of Art, Wits University
Writer, Lecturer
Chris Thurman, Johannesburg
Associate Professor at Wits University, Business Day Arts Columnist, Johannesburg
Tegan Bristow, Johannesburg
Head of Interactive Media, Digital Arts Division, Wits University.
PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium, Plymouth University, UK.
Ruth Simbao, Grahamstown
Associate Professor at Rhodes University and Leader of the ‘Visual and Performing
Arts of Africa’ research team
Matthew Blackman, Cape Town
Writer and Curator
Daniel Browde, Johannesburg
Freelance writer and editor
Nico Krijno
Artist and Photographer, Cape Town
3. Athi-Patra Ruga
Bogosi Sekhukhuni
Bettina Malcomess
Farieda Nazier & Alberta Whittle
Senzeni Marasela
Jemma Kahn & Roberto Pombo
Mandisa Poefficient Vundla
Anthea Moys
Michael MacGarry
CUSS Group
Donna Kukama
Riaan Hendricks
Sibs Shongwe-La Mer
Kudzanai Chiurai
Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, The Dulibadzimu Theatre Group
Dan Halter
Shannon Walsh & Arya Lalloo
Nicolas Boone
Kgafela oa Magogodi & Jyoti Mistry
Nduka Mntambo
4. 4
TWO PASSPORTS — one expired, the other marked
VOID — lie half-hidden in a pile of charred rubbish.
The small discarded documents are bound together
by a partially melted elastic band. Across the
intersection, the hunched figure of the Sack-and-
Ash man, sitting beside a small fire, warming his
hands on this cold dry highveld winter’s day.
Res derelictae. Things abandoned.
*
KEKANA JOHN NGCOBO
Passport date of issue: 1994-12-23
He, with his English middle name and Zulu surname,
was born in Johannesburg on March 16th 1961,
exactly a year after the Sharpeville massacre and
only weeks before South Africa became a republic
on May 31st 1961.
PASPOORT
PASSPORT
PASSEPORT
— the cover branded with three colonial
languages: Afrikaans, English and French. The dates
within its pages collapse three-and-a-half decades
of South African history. This official document,
certifying national identity and international
immigration status, also starkly registers (in faded
purple ink) various chapters in a personal story:
beginnings and endings; birthdays and expiry dates;
permissions to enter, but only for limited periods
— and only after paying a fee for a visa sticker or
stamp.
Dates of international border crossings
speak of national bureaucratic controls, but also
bracket the times spent between these temporal
markers. Who is this person with ID number
6103165687086? A number that gives no clue to
the fact that just eight years before this passport
was issued, the identification number in such a
document would have been constructed like this:
aa bb cc (birth date) xxxx (gender) xx (race)
z (a control number).
Nor does this number let on that before
1986 its bearer would not have had a passport:
until then, black South Africans were not granted
citizenship of apartheid South Africa.
In 1986 racial identification criteria was
removed by a new Identification Act; the 1952
Blacks Act (Abolition of Passes and Co- ordination
of Documents) or “Pass Law” was repealed, and
citizenship rights were returned to black South
Africans by the Restoration of South African Citizen
Act.
This document tells us that Kekana John
Ngcobo travelled to Japan in 2002 and returned to
South Africa via Korea. His JAPAN VISA allows a
one-year stay as the spouse of a Japanese citizen.
MORITA MORINAKA
Passport date of issue: 1994-12-23
She was born in Oita, Japan on February 14th 1964.
Newborns from around that date are known in
Japan as Shinjinrui, or new people: those who did
not grow up during the difficult years of WWII or
its aftermath. Her red and gold Japanese passport,
パスポート, was issued in a postwar reconstructed
Tokyo.
A temporary residence permit in South Africa
was issued for HOLIDAY purposes and expired on
June 26th 1995. A further set of water-blurred
South African PERMANENT RESIDENCE STATUS
stamps, dated October 7th 1995 — Accompany
Husband, HOME AFFAIRS JOHANNESBURG — blot
facing pages.
*
THE PROHIBITION OF Mixed Marriages Act, Act
No 55 of 1949 was an early piece of apartheid
legislation law that prohibited marriages between
people of different races.
Not only was a so-called WHITE or
EUROPEAN person forbidden to marry a person
of another colour; any sexual relations were illegal
too. Mixed couples, if discovered, were arrested
and imprisoned. (The Act was repealed in 1985 by
the Immorality and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages
Amendment Act).
In apartheid South Africa, Kekana John Ngcobo
would have been classified as BLACK. Morita
Morinaka — a Japanese person — as HONORARY
WHITE.
Their relationship and marriage was a direct
strike against centuries of official and internalised
racial identification. Their move highlights a spirit
of nonconformism and a sophisticated level of
individuation that mark a new kind of Johannesburg
citizenry — challenging received binaries of race and
culture, rejecting old modes of identification and
social being.
These documents, with their faded purple-
ink stamps and seals, their official signatures and
nationalist watermarks overwritten by various
agents of decision- making and control, denote the
grind of the machine inside the state apparatus.
Physical documentation holds increasingly
talismanic power: — bearing, for example, the
desperation and frustration of regional immigrants
seeking temporary or permanent residency in
South Africa. An increasingly harsh network of
immigration laws, along with wilful obfuscation of
the approval processes, exacerbated by false fees,
formalised bribery and other forms of corruption,
form part of what Achille Mbembe has called
“a complex chain of complicities” behind the
xenophobic violence flaring across South Africa:
“A few weeks ago,” Mbembe writes1, “I
attended a meeting of ‘foreign’ staff at
Wits University [in Johannesburg]. Horrific
stories after horrific stories.Work permits not
renewed. Visas refused to family members ....
A Kafkaian situation that extends to ‘foreign’
students who entered the country legally, had
their visas renewed all this time, but who now
find themselves in a legal uncertainty, unable
to register, and unable to access the money ...
that had been allocated to them.”
*
THE SACK-AND-ASH MAN has made his home
beneath the colossal concrete structure of the
Johannesburg Ring Road — one of a network of such
Home Affairs
BY ROELOF PETRUS VAN WYK
1 Achille Membe writes about xenophobia in South Africa in AFRICA IS
COUNTRY (africaisacountry.com) April 16th 2015
5. 5
structures built during apartheid, and an enduring
monument to ongoing asymmetries in South Africa,
reinforced and exacerbated by the neoliberal
economic policies of the current government.
The queue of luxury sedans — drivers blind
to this figure beneath — roll slowly through the early
morning toward the city, for another day of trading
in the mining and banking industries.
To the south, a nether zone of mining
operations, abandoned slag heaps, polluting semi-
industrial areas — and then, further and to the east,
Soweto township, established by the apartheid
government to house the cheap African labour
working in the mines creating the wealth of this city.
To the north, the highway curves and curls
through the man-made forest of Johannesburg’s
affluent neighbourhoods — trees planted originally
for timber to prop- up mine shafts — offering off-
ramps to suburbs named Saxonwold, Cotswold,
Ashwold, Earlswold, Englewold, Griswold and
Abbotswold. Sherwood, Eton and Sherbourne.
Newport, Bristol, Worcester, Ashford and Swansea.
The European imaginary.
Res Derelictae. Things abandoned.
Abandoned, yes ... but by engaging thoughtfully with
what has been left behind, and with what remains
outside the dominant perception, artists can hold
all of our histories, personal and communal, and
produce new narratives for our time.
The multitudes have answers to questions which have
not yet been asked, and the capacity to outlive the walls.
– John Berger
6. 6
i saw her on a sidewalk
i saw her spit blood in a gutter
i saw her thorns in a burnt flesh
i saw her stump for a foot
i saw her clutch a stick
i saw her eyes grin toothless
from ‘Joburg Spiritual’
Wopko Jensma
1973
7. 7
SIBS SHONGWE-LA MER and his film, Necktie
Youth, and the directorial team of ARYA
LALLOO and SHANNON WALSH with their
film, Jeppe on a Friday, investigate Joburg’s
underbelly — albeit on opposite ends of the
income scale.
DONNA KUKAMA swings from one
of the concrete highway’s bridges and, while
throwing money to street traders beneath, falls
and breaks her leg in The Swing.
RIAAN HENDRICKS’s lens in The Bridge
observes the human traffic on the Nelson
Mandela bridge, suspended across the railroad
tracks separating the CBD from the North.
NICOLAS BOONE and his camera,
unwaveringly on the heels of untrained actors
re-enacting real-life stories, traverses the highly
contested urban spaces of the inner-city in
Hillbrow.
FARIEDA NAZIER and ALBERTA
WHITTLE investigate and challenge perceptions
of beauty and race.
SENZENI MTWAKAZI MARASELA
embodies the genealogical narratives of
subjugated black women through her current
performative persona, Theodora Hlongwane.
ATHI-PATRA RUGA is (re)writing the
history of The Future White Women of Azania.
Blurring the boundaries between street
performance and theatre, JEMMA KAHN and
Roberto Pombo, act out various narratives
through drawings and storytelling, while MANDI
POEFFICIENT VUNDLA delivers powerful Spoken
Word poetry that speaks to the heart and gets
close to the broken bone.
BOGOSI SEKHUKUNI walks the electronic
superhighway and meditates on the deferred
rainbow dream. And ANTHEA MOYS attempts to
break the rules of the game, injecting chaos into
its structure, as she explores the intersection
of art and play and questions the meaning of
failure.
THENJIWE NIKI NKOSI & THE
DULIBADZIMU THEATRE GROUP, along with
DAN HALTER, trace the meaning of the river
separating South Africa and Zimbabwe.
KUDZANAI CHIURAI, born in Zimbabwe,
and now resident there again, explores a utopian
notion of statehood in his second home, South
Africa.
MICHAEL MACGARRY meditates on the
new scramble for Africa, investigating the banal
poetics of instant, empty cities built by Chinese
migrant workers in Luanda, Angola. His work
is instantly localised when a Hong Kong-based
Chinese company announces its intention to
build a new financial centre “on a par with cities
like New York and Hong Kong in the Far East” — a
gateway for Chinese firms investing in Sub-
Saharan Africa...
Itchy City is a five- minute sequence
where, together with JYOTI MISTRY, elements
of KGAFELA AO MAGOGODI’S live performance
are superimposed with real and painted city
views of Johannesburg to create a powerful
commentary on everyday life and absurdities
in a city with an “itching soul”. If this be a city
by NDUKA MNTAMBO, pushes discursive and
aesthetic choices offered by the film.
The selected artists work largely in the
mediums of film and performance. Each has
an affiliation with Johannesburg, claiming (or
disclaiming) a unique connection with this place
they call, alternately, Johannesburg, Joburg,
Jozi, Egoli (City of Gold).
10. 10
Hermetically sealed in its history, and marked to a series of points in the distance, its surface today
approximates that of a beautiful theme park. As such, it is host to the single most important event in the
art-world calendar, and the launch of the Johannesburg Pavilion.
The lived experience of Johannesburg’s complex history and present-tense is the focus of
this civic Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Inherent to the idea of a Johannesburg Pavilion is the
impossibility of recreating or representing a holistic environment. This Pavilion does not purport to that.
Instead, it is an examination of the city — the cartography of which, as evidenced in the works of the
chosen artists, manifests a multitude of attendant dichotomies and micro-narratives.
Part political statement, part response to this year’s Biennale theme, the Pavilion’s programme
is, at the same time, constituted of a series of singular and idiosyncratic meditations on life in this
disruptive and fantastic African metropolis.
There is no desire to create the city in facsimile, but rather to explore the personal and the
oblique within it, and to examine how this exploration can be used to forge fresh, alternate spaces.
As the first and most established art fair on the continent, the FNB Joburg Art Fair has been
instrumental in growing and sustaining an industry for the visual arts. It also plays a critical role beyond
the commercial sphere, supporting not-for-profit content through its varied programme of cultural
activities. Platforms for Special Projects and Talks channel new insights into the African art scene and
facilitate encounters between artists, curators, and collectors at home and abroad.
The Johannesburg Pavilion was created in partnership with the 133 Arts Foundation with the
view to a virtual institution, one that operates and exists in a third space — between the domestic and the
foreign, the physical and the mediated. This ongoing platform for the exposure of African artists abroad
has no pavilion, is subject to no physical laws, and instead exists fluidly, reflexively, ready to be installed,
inflated or popped-up in a variety of guises and contexts. This is a pavilion for our times, and one that
intends to mark its phantom stake in the ground well beyond the temporal limits of this Venice Biennale.
On this occasion it is through the vigorous forms of experimental film and live performance that
we invite you to experience the fictional, real and alternate taxonomies of a place called Johannesburg.
We know it fondly as Joburg: a place undergoing rapid rebuilding and transformation; rife with the
friction born of the interaction of the planned and the unplanned, the visual noise of the street view
versus the clean lines of the plan. Our objective is for artists of the Johannesburg Pavilion to emerge on
a global stage and to prosper.
One of the early modern civic republics, Venice has
evolved and morphed in recent times into a kind of
fictional space.
THE CIVIC
LUCY MACGARRY
Curator, FNB Joburg Art Fair
12. 12
A Politics of Refusal
ATHI-PATRA RUGA’S art creates a powerful politics of refusal- a strategy he
employs to articulate alternative worlds filled with new possibilities.
Through his Future White Women of Azania personas and performance, he
constructs an aesthetic system that refuses to be restricted by gender binaries,
racial distinctions, historical specificities, defining origins or formative ancestry.
Yet this is not a self-enclosed or self-indulgent world where simply anything goes
and anything is possible; rather, his Azania is an alternative performative reality
born out of Ruga’s very personal experience as a gay Xhosa man who has often
found himself on the peripheries of heteronormative communities, traversing
zones of unbelonging and exclusion.
His response to this imposed liminality is the creation of a spectacular
Azania, apparently a reference to the Utopia of equality, liberty and unity often
invoked by African nationalists such as the Pan African Congress under apartheid,
but redefined in an idiosyncratic way by drawing on his background in art, fashion
and performance.
Ruga’s Azania is populated by an incongruous ballooned persona in red
stockings and stilettos, somewhat disparagingly referred to as the Future White
Woman. But the playful even carnivalesque quality of the performance is always
laced with the real - the seemingly weightless body of the ambiguously gendered
performer – a bunch of balloons? – encases a physical working body, often walking
miles with this heavy load; similarly, the sheer beauty of the ballooned being
is edged by the threat of popping balloons and the expulsion of fluid inside the
balloons (often red like blood).
It is this play with fantasy and reality, with beauty and violence, that
situates Ruga’s oeuvre not simply in some Afrofuturist utopia, nor in a self-
referential enclosed world (Cremaster-like), but connects it to the problems of our
here and now.
But Ruga refuses to embrace this world as it is; rather, through his
imaginative reworking and hybrid creations he suggests alternative belongings.
Dr. Liese van der Watt
Athi-Patra Ruga
b. Umtata, Swaziland, 1984. Lives and works in Cape Town.
Queen and Autocrat of All Azania, of Saint Alexandria,
Johannesburg, Pretoria, Sacred Queen
of Maseru, Sacred Queen of Lobamba.
13. THE GOVERNMENT
The government of the
Versatile Kingdom of Azania is a difficult
one to categorize under traditional
definitions... At best, Azania is a
semi-absolute monarchy whereby most
authority is vested in the reigning monarch.
Historically, since the reign of the VERSATILE
QUEEN IVY, Azania has been a matriarchy
where the throne was occupied solely by a
non-dynastic line of VERSATILE QUEENS.
Each successive Queen was chosen by the
previous monarch from the covenant known as
the ABOHDADE. From time to time during this
period of Matriarchy, Azania had a parliament
whom derived their authority from powers vested
in it by the VERSATILE QUEEN, powers that she
could effectively restrict, expand, or completely
take away and dissolve parliament all together.
Today, as created through the SACRED
VERSATILE QUEEN IVY, the monarch serves as
the sole authority within the Kingdom. A Noble
Conclave, seated by the various noble houses of the
country, serves as a privy council to the monarch.
Each house controls a territory within the
Kingdom of Azania, and in the name of the
monarch, rules over this local territory.
Land can be distributed and re-distributed
between the houses at the ruling monarch’s
discretion. The exact and extent of the authority
each noble house wield’s in their territory is also
at the discretion of the ruling monarch...
Since the death of THE ELDERS, the realm
now known as Azania has been ruled by a
SACRED VERSATILE QUEEN (with only one
exception when an ELDER ruled the country).
This title was bestowed upon the first
SACRED VERSATILE QUEEN, Ivy, by Pope
Francis, in the year 2014.
Since that time, the title has been maintained and
passed on from one woman to the next, in a nondynastic
line of SACRED VERSATILE QUEENS.
Stipulations at the time where that the
SACRED VERSATILE QUEEN be not a
virgin, and that this be maintained as the
ruling Queen was to emulate that of the once
powerful, Mother of the First Elder.
Each successive SACRED VERSATILE QUEEN
since the time of the FIRST VERSATILE IVY, has
been chosen by their predecessor from a covenant of
nuns known as the ABODADE, women devoted to
live their lives as The Mother of the First Elder.
The SACRED VERSATILE QUEEN’S power has,
since the foundation of the Kingdom, been absolute.
From time to time, the monarchy has bestowed
certain legislative powers to legislative bodies,
the last being a bicameral parliament.
Today however, the monarchy’s power is
absolute and the crown serves as both executive
and legislative body of the Kingdom.
Both Head of State as well as Head of
Government, the SACRED QUEEN is the sole
force steering the direction of the Kingdom.
Among the crowns absolute power, the
SACRED QUEEN determines and sets the
domestic and foreign policy of the Azania,
decrees laws, resolves problems arises in all
levels of government, and grant pardons.
In practice, the monarchy makes most
decisions from the advice of a privy council
the Noble Conclave.
It also exercises most of its power through
the various ministers of the Royal Cabinet.
FULL TITLE OF THE SACRED QUEEN:
Her Royal Versatile Majesty,..............by the
Grace of *** bleep sound ***, Sacred Versatile
Queen and Autocrat of All Azania, of Saint
Alexandria, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Sacred
Queen of Maseru, Sacred Queen of Lobamba,
Sacred Queen of Mbabane, Bhisho, Port
Elizabeth, Bloemfontein, Pietermaritzburg,
Durban, Polokwane, Nelspruit, Rustenburg,
Kimberley, Saint Helena Isle, Ascension Isle,
Protector of the Azanian Church, Keeper of
the Prophecies of FUTURE WHITE WOMEN,
Revered Mother of the sisterhood of ABODADE,
Matriarch of the Noble Conclave, and blessed
Mother to the Azanian people.
The Sisterhood of ABODADE is a nunnery
whose establishment was originally designed
for the sole purpose of providing an heir
for the throne. The sisters of the order model
themselves after the FIRST MOTHER OF ELDERS.
They are seen with great respect in
the eyes of the populace.
Sisters of the order can be distinguished by
the veils which they constantly wear and are
so thick that no one can see their faces. It is
actually against the law to see a Sister’s face.
The order is head by a DADEMKHULU
of whom is the right-hand of the SACRED
QUEEN and was historically
the SACRED VERATILE QUEEN’S heir.
However, since the SACRED QUEEN is now
of a single bloodline, the Sisterhood’s role has changed.
Though they still service the Queen,
they no longer provide an heir for her
and continue hold little power or influence
within the New Azania.
14. 14
#connected4eva
In the grand narrative of the Internet, everyone surfs in the same gentle waves of
coded bliss, pampered by colour-filtered images of our soft-focus selves.
We are younger, fitter and happier!
We bow to the algorithmic beauty, speed and agility of the Internet bots. We
created them and now they create us. Busy little bots: they create, delete, order and
structure our zeroes and ones, and we thank them in our machine- quantified sleep.
We put everything in that Internet machine — our thoughts, our darkest secrets, our
desires for love, sex and a soulmate.
The Internet saves all!
Now, past the techno-sticky veneer of connected consciousness, we find ourselves in
an unexpected tailspin. #WTF just happened? We scan our brains, slowly diffracting
into the ethernet cable. Did we just dream that? Or did we really just fuck our own
Facebook profile?
Our dreamscapes and bodies merge with the vibrations and rhythms of the machine
and while we blinked we became one. We see ourselves, our fathers, our mothers,
and our sisters as abstractions, in Chrome, in Transfer, in Rise, in Valencia, in 140
characters.
We resist skepticism, this is the Internet after all; she cares, loves and hopes! But
things feel weird. An intimate coupling of techno-lust, pulsating with new yiks, yaks,
tweets, pokes, flags, pins and pings, we embrace our dissolution into the network.
Natalie Dixon
Bogosi Sekhukhuni
b. 1991. Lives and works in Johannesburg.
...mostly I think technology is the way out for black
youth, and not necessarily politics....
15. The Rainbow Deferred
HISTORICALLY, ART AND ART-MAKING have provided a unique opportunity to
break from traditional modes of behaviour and forms of communication. This is in
evidence in South Africa today — particularly when one considers how new media
art (technologically based, electronically charged) is rapidly becoming the voice of
a new generation of practitioners.
Bogosi Sekhukhuni — one of the this generation’s brightest lights — works
with video and performance, mining digital media’s relentless simultaneity,
invoking over- stimulation as both a means and an end.
Sekhukhuni sometimes describes himself as a “product of the Rainbow
Nation” and sometimes as a “coconut”: two painfully descriptive and loaded terms
in a post- apartheid South Africa struggling in its attempts at a single inclusive
identity. Of course, in much of Sekhukhuni’s work, this Rainbow Nation and indeed
this “coconut” state of being (brown on the outside, white on the inside) become
the targets of his critique. And when he sets about undermining these notions,
he does so cleverly, making subjects of the sacred and taboo with the youthful
rebellion of a “Born Free” (another loaded post- apartheid term) — well aware of
both the privilege and the potential entrapment that come with being “free”.
As part of CUSS, a South African digital art artists collective, Sekhukhuni
has allowed his highly personal vision to be seen in the presence of others’ visions
— not as a conflicting contrast, but, instead, as one of the group’s various creative
directions: an unusual and noteworthy position in a global arts culture that
continues to celebrate the solo superstar.
Mpho Moshe Matheolane
16. 16
the memories of others
THIS IS A SERIES of ephemeral performances and installations at different
sites working with the first appearances of film as projection in the street, in
theaters and in makeshift, mobile ‘cinemas’. This series of ‘moving images’ or
‘appearances’ combines film, voice and gesture to stage different modalities of
movement that reflect our imagination of space, time and memory. An ascent,
a landing, an arrival, a departure, a recollection, the description of a scene, the
flashback, waiting, scrolling, falling, watching, the reversal.
The piece begins from archival footage of the ‘Great African Air
Race’ from the United Kingdom to Johannesburg during the British Empire
Exhibition. The race was a failure, with only one plane actually making it to
Johannesburg and three fatal accidents en route. The race imagines the
African continent as a single territory over which an essentially abstract,
colonial movement takes place across a map: from Portsmouth to Cairo to
Khartoum to Johannesburg.
However, those waiting for the finish at the Rand Airport had already
left by the time the winner landed. At the centre of the work is the idea that if
the end of the journey is never seen, does the movement ever end?
The narrator of the performances is a character afflicted with the
ability to remember the memories of others at the cost of having no memories
of their own. This character suffers from a kind of agnosia, an inability to
recognise or name one’s own sensations. This is not unlike the mechanism
of film: a receptacle for memories never experienced. Every day we navigate
the spaces of our screens, we are the intimate spectators of a succession
of temporary images. In just a moment we can experience banality, beauty,
violence. They seem to contain and to become our histories, these timelines.
What if you were to remember the end of
a journey you never witnessed?
Inside the Not No Place
BETTINA MALCOMESS IS a writer and artist whose interdisciplinary and
collaborative practice is strongly located in the city of Johannesburg, where
she grew up and lives and teaches. She co-authored the book ‘Not No
Place – Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times’ (Jacana, 2013) with
Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, the result of six years of research and field work.
The book treated the city as material to produce a kind of collage
of textual, visual and archival fragments that spoke to Johannesburg’s
nature a city of competing images. Not a single image but many
fragmentary images project themselves onto the city’s spaces, often
incoherent, contesting, competing. Johannesburg is a city of mythologies,
described as elusive and disorderly, a city without water, a mining town, a
city of insecurity and separation.
Drawing on the structure of ‘The Arcades Project’ by Walter
Benjamin, the book explores the construction of these competing images
and mythologies of Johannesburg. The title is a play on the direct
translation of ‘U-topia’ as no place, where the negation of ‘no place’ opens
up potential for the actual materialisation of ‘place’ within the city and the
double negative: each place contains its opposite, that which is not place.
From Ethiopian traders downtown to various religious groups walking to
places of worship on Sundays to New-York styled residents in gentrified
areas, each define their own city.
Malcomess’ work is always about this tension between the images
and imaginaries of spaces and their lived realities. Her practice is both
spatial and driven by research, working with ways to visualise and present
the minor histories of sites, often public, where her performances and
installations appear.
She has produced several collaborative, site-specific performances,
including a multimedia theatre piece staged in front of the Castle of Good
Hope in Cape Town.
Her concern with history is complex and always developing. Her
work is produced by an association of seemingly disparate fragments,
whether in the form of fictional narratives, quotations, found images and
footage, or her own photographs. A combination of voice, performance,
objects, text and image leave a lot to the audience to decide.
Her writing and performance often multiplies the authorial voice,
and she usually performs under the name Anne Historical.
Since 2010 she has produced iterations of the Millennium Bar, a
temporary structure assembled from architectural fragments collected from
scrap yards and demolition sites. This temporary structure responds to the
constellation of historical, economic and social relations of each site where
it is built, here an exchange always takes place with an audience that stages
the complexities of these relations.
A lot of the Millennium Bar objects were found and bought in
Johannesburg, including the lectern of a former Synagogue (now a
Pentecostal church). These objects reflect the transformation of a city that
has an uncertain relationship to its own heritage. Johannesburg can be
described as a city defined by a nostalgia for its future, not its past. These
objects also stage the artist’s questions about her own position and history
within the city.
While Malcomess may at times disappear in her work amongst all these
objects, voices, texts and images that define her assemblages, she is always the
author, even if it the city might at times appears to be the main character.
Bettina Malcomess
b. 1977, Johannesburg. Lives and Works in Johannesburg.
I was told that as a child, I could speak another language.
I forgot this language, and as a consequence forgot
myself.
20. 20
Women’s Waiting/Women’s Searching: Senzeni Marasela and Theodorah Hlongwane
SENZENI MARASELA AND Theodorah Hlongwane travel from Johannesburg to
Venice. They pack red dresses fabricated from Seshoeshoe cloth from Lesotho, one
dress for each day.
Theodorah, named after Marasela’s mother, is waiting and searching for
her husband Gebane who left her behind in her village. The specificities of time and
place are unknown, although we know that this is a South African inflection of the
universal story of women’s waiting.
Theodorah travelled to Johannesburg in search of Gebane. She imagines
that only he can release her from the dress of the married woman, which binds her
to him. The memories of women, historical, familial and mythical, overlay those of
Senzeni, Theodorah, and the maternal presence we cannot see. There is no way
of anticipating what the women, visible and unseen, will discover in Venice where
Marasela will stage a performance:
Intsomi zakwaXhosa
Senzeni, in character as Theodorah, will read fables and fairy-tales written
in Xhosa, a language that she (Senzeni) can neither readily read nor understand.
Marasela deliberately amplifies the sensations of displacement, and the affective
oscillations of familiarity and strangeness. But how the familiar and the strange is
experienced is contingent on what is seen and heard, how it is that looking occurs,
and the form that listening takes.
Marasela’s performances enter into dialogues with women’s memories
and narratives: ‘I feel the need personally to participate in writing black women’s
history. This includes exploring issues about our bodies, and how it is we survive
trapped in-between two patriarchal worlds (one black, and the other white),’ she has
said. As Senzeni performs Theodorah the borderlines between everyday life and
staged performance are obscured and bleed across each other. The figures Senzeni-
Theodorah are transformed into sites of history, myth and memory while they are
simultaneously physical-affective presences searching and moving across the public
spaces of cities.
Yvette Greslé
Senzeni Mthwakazi Marasela
b. 1977, Boksburg. Lives and Works in Soweto.
I remind them of their own waiting...
23. 23
Right of Admission
FARIEDA NAZIER AND and Alberta Whittle’s piece Right of Admission sits a little
uneasily in a territory somewhere between art, practice, performance, text and
polemic. On the opening night of its final showing — in a staged performance that
lasted more than four hours and involved the un-making and un-masking of the
two actors/artistes — there was a palpable hush in the room as the piece unfolded.
I use the word “uneasily” both purposefully and admiringly. The piece
is both public and intimate: two women, provocatively dressed, sit in the
middle of a small room that is open to the street and passersby — not quite
shop window, not quite art gallery interior, not quite stage set. Both women
strike the dreamy, preoccupied pose of Morisot’s ‘Woman at her Toilette’, aware
yet unmoved. In attendance, three or four women work quickly and nimbly to
unbraid the artists’ hair.
We’re in Braamfontein, the heart of Johannesburg, and there are hair
salons all around. Braamfontein is also the beating heart of Johannesburg’s inner-
city revival: the curious passersby resist easy categorisation, as does the piece.
Young, old; black, white; students, residents; artists, critics and the curious...
everyone crams inside the room, jostling for space, unasked questions on the tips
of their tongues: what is this? what is it about?
Meanwhile, Nazier and Whittle sit patiently as their attendants go to work,
stripping them of their elaborate hairdos and assumed identities simultaneously.
But there’s a subtle twist that interests and confuses the audience: the artists are
black; their attendants are white. It’s a neat reversal of historical roles that throws
into sharp relief what the work is about: expectation, particularly in relation to
race. That the two artists are of mixed-race descent complicates matters even
further: where is the line between black and white?
Two women having their hair unbraided: a deceptively simple yet
profoundly complex piece of work that throws up more questions than it can
possibly answer.
Lesley Lokko
Farieda Nazier & Alberta Whittle
b. 1980, Cape Town. Lives in Johannesburg.
b. 1980, Bridgetown, Barbados. Lives in Cape Town and Bridgetown.
...everyone crams inside the room, jostling for space,
unasked questions on the tips of their tongues: what is
this? what is it about?
24. 24
“I really wish God would create less white boys,” she said,
stomping into Peta and June’s apartment. The boys had prepared a meal
in celebration of the crockery Peta inherited from their dead neighbour Mr.
Pigbottom. They were dressed in tuxedos, the table behind them fully set.
“Am I crashing something?”
Ninety-year-old Mr. Pigbottom had been a grandfatherly figure in
brown slacks, a white buttoned shirt and a mossy green cardigan until the
last Sunday of his life. He had limped into the boys’ apartment pointed at
Peta and commanded, “You with the little brown body, I want to lick you all
over like the dirty puppy dog that I am.”
June hugged the ice cream bowl he had been holding. Peta
opened his arms in a shrug and said, “That’s the best offer I’ve had all
year.”
Mr. Pigbottom died three days later, while licking Peta’s taint.
After a month, Peta had opened the apartment door to find a man – Mr.
Pigbottom’s son – with a large box at his feet. “It’s his favorite crockery,”
the son explained. “Thank you for helping my father unleash the puppy
dog within.”
Tina noted the crockery was perfect for a man named Pigbottom.
Oysters on a bed of shaved ice sat in a large bowl in the shape of a
breast cut in half at the nipple. Lobster bisque filled a white ceramic bowl
decorated with Kama Sutra couples along its rim. The main dish; linguini
with mussels and shrimp puttanesca, filled a big black pot in the form of
a man’s crotch and butt. The large erection served as a handle. After the
champagne toast – in dick flutes – the friends sat down to eat.
Oysters were not Tina’s favourite; in fact she might have been a
little allergic. She rested her tongue on the hard shell, it felt cold and wet.
“I can’t,” she said. Peta rolled his eyes. Tina was a picky eater. She once
said she didn’t like chocolate cake. But then ate a quarter of vagina shaped
chocolate cake at a lesbian wedding, using just her mouth. All she needed
was encouragement. “Bitch, try it,” Peta said, taking his second oyster.
“You’ve just left bat boy and I smell like dentures. It’s a new fucking day.”
June took a moment to imagine a bat boy flying into the open
dentures of the sun. It was glorious.
Tina inhaled sharply through her nose, and then quickly sucked
the squishy meat into her mouth, a frog catching its prey. June felt the
faintest twitch in his underpants. He liked Tina. He liked her large red
lips, her tiny breasts and her fleshy legs. He also liked her personality,
of course. But what he really liked were her wild, Botticelli curls. He
fantasised about brushing them like he would a Barbie, or cumming on
them in figures of eight.
The lobster bisque was served in white ceramic bowls shaped
like penises with very large scrotums. Tina could not think of any other
situation where a large ball sack was useful. Her bat boy ex was proud
of his, but his situation resembled a pair of grapefruit and a toe. It would
have been satisfying to see the bat come back to life and feast on those
grotesque balls, she thought.
She had made the right decision coming over to see the boys.
They were silently enjoying the bisque. They looked angelic. She didn’t
know why they had not fucked each other already. And the thought of
them doing it made her cream her panties just a tad. She crossed her legs.
“This is wrong,” Peta licked his spoon. “I don’t know if it’s this
slutty crockery or this delicious bisque but it just feels inappropriate to
have this dinner with our clothes on.” Something flashed in Tina’s mind;
writhing bodies covered in lobster bisque, panting. She clutched her neck,
it felt hot and itchy. She unbuttoned her dress.
June looked down on his tuxedo suit. It made him feel less like
an overgrown baby and more like the pansexual piece of meat he felt he
truly was. He glanced at Tina. Her dress was slipping down her shoulders.
He imagined himself as a hundred little ant-sized Junes crawling all over
Tina’s dancing body. That’s how much he wanted to inhabit her.
He glanced at Peta who was unbuttoning his shirt, revealing
the tight little body that had comforted Mr. Pigbottom in his last days.
He suddenly felt sad for Mr. Pigbottom. Why did he take so long before
embracing the fact that he was really a puppy that wanted to lick brown
bodies? He wondered what would have happened if Mr. Pigbottom had
embraced his true nature earlier: there was Mr. Pigbottom as a puppy
faced pig wearing a cardigan and a studded leather jockstrap, giving
a presentation to a room full of Japanese businessmen; there was Mr.
Pigbottom – “June?” Tina brought him back. He quickly threw of his jacket
and ripped his shirt of, buttons flying onto the table.
“Sexy!” Peta said.
Looking at June’s pale, skinny fat body he felt his face grow hot. He looked
like a gross overgrown baby, but in a sexy way.
June unzipped his trousers and Peta imagined Tina fingering
herself and taking pictures as he rode cowboy on June’s hairy stomach,
squeezing his soft tits and shouting, “Fill me up with your lard, you dirty
dirty slut!”
The three of them sat fully naked in silence. June refilled their
champagne dick- flutes.
Tina ladled more bisque for herself. “Peta,” she dipped a breast
into her penis bowl. “I dare you to lick this lobster bisque off my breast.”
Spaghetti of the Whores
2
Lebogang Mogashoa
Jemma Kahn & Roberto Pombo
b. 1983, Johannesburg. Lives in Johannesburg.
b. 1986, Johannesburg. Lives in Johannesburg.
ONCE UPON A TIME, Tina broke off her engagement. She walked
in on her his fiancé shoving a dead bat in his anus while his friends
cheered and clapped. He ran after her, explaining that he had lost a
bet, as if that made it better.
2 Spaghetti of the Whores features in ‘WE DIDN’T COME TO HELL FOR THE CROISSANTS: 7 DEADLY NEW STORIES FOR CONSENTING ADULTS’. Performed by Jemma Kahn and Roberto Pombo, and directed by
Lindiwe Matshikiza, ‘CROISSANTS’ will premiere at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, in July 2015
25. 25
She looked him right in the eye, feeling strangely fierce.
“And what is my punishment if I don’t?” Peter asked. He and Tina
held their defiant eye contact. June brushed his nipple with his fingers.
“Then,” Tina held her gaze and dipped her other breast into the bisque,
“you have to suck bisque of June’s tits.” June felt his penis twitch yet
again. “That’s not how it works,” Peta said, his voice low with horniness.
With his eyes still locked on Tina’s, he climbed the table and crawled over
to her like a cat.
“Good boy,” she patted his head. He nuzzled her breasts before
licking the nipples with long strokes.
Tina stared at June. Her face looked a little swollen on one side. She
extended her left forefinger and signalled him to come to her. He snarled,
climbed onto the table and then crawled to her just like Peta. She patted
his head as he took her other breast into his mouth. He and Peta put their
arms on each other’s backs and sucked enthusiastically on Tina’s breasts,
their butts pointing up in the air.
Tina forcefully pushed them back to the table. They looked like
obedient little dogs, sitting on their knees, tongues hanging out from
panting, lobster bisque all over their faces. Tina held their chins in her
palms and turned their faces to each other. They kissed, slowly at first
and then voraciously, consuming each other’s mouths. Tina reached for
the Kama Sutra bowl behind them and poured the lobster bisque on their
heads. June and Peta moaned loudly as the bisque ran down their bodies.
It was exactly like Tina’s earlier vision; bisque-covered bodies panting and
writhing hungrily.
June turned away from Peta and faced Tina. Her face looked
flushed and wild and perhaps a little lopsided. He took one of her hands
and Peta took the other. They pulled her onto the table, clearing a few
dishes with their legs. A dick-flute rolled off and broke into a thousand
dick shards. They laid her down on the table, kneeling on either side of
her. She brushed her long curls of her breasts and rested her arms on the
sides of her head. June grabbed the big black crotch pot and emptied the
linguini with mussels and shrimp puttanesca all over Tina’s tummy. She
thrashed about and shouted, “Viva il spaghetti puttanesca!”
The boys grabbed handfuls of the pasta and raised their arms in victory,
“Viva!”
They spread the bright red wormy mess all over Tina’s body. She
arched her back and thrust her body up towards them and they lowered
themselves onto her, rubbing the linguini puttanesca all over their bodies.
Tina brought her head forward and sat up. She grabbed two handfuls
of the saucy pasta and slapped them. They roared like wild animals and
pulled her into a three way kiss. Bits of linguini flew out of their mouths
and they chewed and kissed one another with abandon.
They communicated in wild hungry noises, their bodies undulating. June
pushed Tina back onto the table. The entire left side of her face had now
doubled in size. As June wondered just how turned on Tina must be, his
erection got an erection. He pushed it into her and Tina made throaty,
choking sounds. She pushed back into June’s linguini puttanesca covered
cock.
Next to them, Peta swallowed the champagne bottle neck whole,
slobbering all over it.
Tina drove herself harder into June’s cock, moving the table with
her. She struggled to breathe, heaving and gurgling. Peta pulled his mouth
of the champagne bottle and slipped it into his butt, his anus engulfing its
neck in entirety. He bounced up and down on it, to the rhythm of Tina and
June’s fucking.
Tina gurgled something. She clutched her throat, her head
swinging from side to side. She tried to speak but only choking sounds
came out. “What’s wrong?” June asked, still inside her. Tina gasped for
air, her entire face now completely swollen. Peta got on his knees and
leaned into her, the champagne bottle flipping upside down and emptying
itself into his butthole. “I think she’s having an allergic reaction,” he
screamed. Tina nodded vigorously still grinding onto June’s penis. “Call
the ambulance!” The champagne bottle in his butt made it seem as if he
had a tail.
June leaned back, grabbing his trousers. Tina pushed herself into
him so hard they almost fell of the table. June searched his pockets, all
the while still thrusting into Tina.
Peta held a sharp knife in his hands, and spoke gently but firmly.
“If we wait for the ambulance it will be too late. I’m going to make an
incision on your throat; I know what I’m doing. Is that okay?” Tina closed
her eyes and nodded. She pushed even harder into June, her head
perfectly still on the table. Tears flew out of June’s eyes. Peta held the
knife against her throat and counted, “One, two, three!”
Blood gushed out of the tiny incision in Tina’s throat. She and
June thrashed about in relief and orgasm. Peta shouted, “Who’s the pig
bottom now, bitches?!” and the champagne bottle shot out of his butt and
smashed against the wall behind them, shattering into tiny flying pieces.
A fountain of champagne gushed out of his butthole and rained down
on their bodies. The boys collapsed on either side of Tina. An ambulance
could be heard from the outside. “I love you,” they all said. And they lived
happily ever after.
The end.
28. 28
THE RAPE CAPITAL
There’s a province in the rape capital of the
South African womb
where cross roads are angry at men
who declare she had cigarette loose legs,
they skuif the 15-year stompie’s last death.
Autumn leaves her ashy feet on a winter street
that breathes heavy like T.B.
when the wind blows her body across the road
like smoke,
the tar coughs up phlegm to clear her skeleton
from its chest
then summer sweats her death like granules of
malaria on the pavement.
The seasons are contracting fever by day
a chronic disease called rape is floating in the
air
and it’s worse than AIDS.
The CD4 doesn’t count yet
just the number of men you’ve slept with.
Questions will feel like knives held against your
cunt probing, are you sexually active?
Yes!!! Will sound the alarm
the sirens will raise their frowns
but the ambulance won’t come.
In the private parts of our ghetto
there are cervical wars.
Underwears are under attack.
A city of cavity walls crumble
from testicular drones,
Street lights watch
vaginas tear at the fence
there’s a cycle of menstrual men
bleeding women at their gates,
where yards tell double stories
of rape on one acre of land
her body lies bent like crescent.
No U-turn for the uterus,
so the gutters drain Noxolo Nogwaza’s pelvis.
Listen to her name it’s a peace sign
getting stabbed at the end of its phrase.
Her soul has reached a dead end
in a town called Booysens,
Anene a dilapidated building
sky scraping statistics.
Can you imagine the view from the windows
of her soul
when Bredasdorp let her perpetrator walk
over his sins like a bridge built on the breaking
backs of women,
who stood like pillars against chauvinistic odds
you strike a woman you strike igneous rock
we will burn these tombstones.
Where we’re slaughtered like sacrificial goats
served to patriarchal Gods
who hold our bodies like oath
at the temples of their groins,
we’re sworn to serve their testosterone.
When the graves set the tables
of hate crimes are seated
where bloody napkins
wipe their feet on table mats
laying a cutlery of bones
besides shovel like spoons,
where bowls fill like tombs
raving bodies like you
will your skeletons get out the fucken closet?
Where gay pride is hung by gender violence there are exorcists
casting demons with their manhood from the bodies of lesbians
queens dethroned from the earth.
There are ghosts of girls clinging to umbilical
cords in court
waiting for justice to be served.
Dear lord deliver us like babies away from this
morgue
where mothers carry body bags in their
stomachs.
The child kicking in the rape capital of the
South African womb
could be you.
Mandi Poefficient Vundla
b. 1987, Soweto. Lives and Works in Soweto.
29. 29
VS
ANTHEA MOYS HAS TURNED herself into a human rugby ball; she has set
up a stationary exercise bike along the route of the 94.7 Cycle Challenge; she has
decorated a boxing ring with flowers.
Moys’ early sports experiments were not merely intended to critique
competitive sport or to mock sportspeople. Rather, as arts critic and curator
Anthea Buys observes, the artist’s interruption of a sporting code — testing
the boundaries, “inserting a bit of chaos into that structure” — becomes an
opportunity to create something original and shared and liberating: “When the
rules of a game shift in response to an obstacle, a new game, potentially one with
fewer pressures and restrictions, replaces the old.”
This openness to learning from others, to mutual creative fun, was at the
heart of Anthea Moys vs. The City of Grahamstown when, in July 2013, Moys took
on denizens of the host city of the National Arts Festival in a series of encounters
she had no hope of winning. Moys participated in battle re-enactments and danced
alone against Ballroom and Latin teams, before trying to match two choirs note
for note. Chess and soccer bouts followed. Then she was beaten up by members of
East Cape Shotokan-Ryu Karate.
Moys excels in none of these disciplines. She trained diligently for three
months, often under the instruction of her more skilled adversaries, and for brief
moments even impressed aficionados with her newly-acquired talents. But in each
case, she entered the fray knowing she would struggle to compete and certainly
could not win.
Why, one may ask, would the inaugural recipient of the Standard Bank
Young Artist Award for Performance Art undertake such an ambitious, ludicrous,
admirable, pitiable quest?
And why would she repeat it, as she subsequently did, in various cities
and in various sporting codes around the world?
If one of the chief considerations in any work of performance art is its
locale, Moys has found a way of engaging with the widest possible variety of
“locals”; to put it in demographic terms, her opponent- collaborators cross all
categories of age, race, sex and class.
What she wants to facilitate is the “special kind of magic that happens
when strangers, from completely different circumstances and backgrounds, get
together and write their own rules of engagement”.
But she is also aware of the likelihood of failure — those moments in which
“magic” is replaced by absurdity. This, too, has value. Like a clown, Moys invites us
to laugh at her and with her, even as we sympathise with her lonely heroism and
appreciate “the poetry, spectacle and pathos of defeat”.
Chris Thurman
Anthea Moys
b. 1980, Johannesburg. Lives in Johannesburg.
...the poetry, spectacle and pathos of defeat.
30. 30
WHAT WE CANNOT talk about is a singular Africa, but rather look at
commonalities, intersections and shared experiences across these numerous, very
different countries as lived by people – both historical and contemporary.
People that have come out of 300 years of colonial occupation by several
regions of Europe, and variously shared histories of modernity, as well as an idea
of progress that was attendant on colonialism, but also followed by periods of
oppressive governments, civil wars, military occupations as well as economic crisis
and collapse. In a way it is to recognise a means of articulating and internalising
the present, by using the past as a tool to understand what is happening today.
The film – Excuse me, while I disappear. – was shot on location in Kilamba
Kiaxi, a new underpopulated city outside Luanda, Angola built by Chinese
construction company CITIC and financed by Hong Kong-based China International
Fund. The city is the largest single capital investment China has made in Sub-
Saharan Africa.
The film follows a young municipal worker who lives by night in the old city
centre of Luanda and works by day as a groundskeeper at the new city of Kilamba
Kiaxi far away. We see him on his morning commute and daily routine sweeping
the new city streets. He day dreams and stares at the new buildings. Unable to
contain his curiosity, he sneaks into an apartment block, and in turn breaks into an
unoccupied apartment. He watches Australian cricket on television. Following the
lunch hour siren he climbs to the roof of the building and quietly disappears.
Michael MacGarry
Born 1978 in Durban. Lives in Johannesburg.
“There is no time here, just living and not living.”
Excuse me, while I disappear.
34. 34
CUSSGROUP_workingTitle
CUSSGROUP, an artist group arising from a common interest
in speaking boldly from a critical and artistic perspective on the
cultures surrounding South Africa’s urban youth and emergent digital
engagements. They are representative of the dynamic media-embedded
cultures that have up to now been left out of the low risk and high value
art gallery economies, and yet are central in defining the contemporary
identity of a networked and globally conscious African.
CUSSGROUP presents its audience with the raw complexity of the
material with which they work. To understand these artworks requires
an understanding of the platforms on which the artworks are presented.
For CUSSGROUP there is an integral relationship between platform and
content, to even speak of them as separate entities is to do disservice
to what they present. Their artworks come in the form of computer
screensavers, online broadcasts, webisodes, selfie series’s, digital collage
and music videos. These forms are true to how they access and share
material amongst themselves and most importantly these are integral to
how their audience /subject consume visual media. The visual complexity
of their work is the tapping of a vein, presenting encounters at a pulse
that is digitally and socially dynamic, alive to the nuance and satire of
networked platforms.
For CUSSGROUP the medium is definitive in representing the
state of South Africa’s socio-political climate. In an interview, Ravi
Govender (one of five member of CUSSGROUP) stated:
…these cultures mostly communicate via cellphone, and that is a
large and important part of the South African we access. They don’t have
access to their own laptops, so it is cellphone dot mobi sites and BlueTooth
as form of exchanging media. These are not the most technologically
advanced tools, but they work… (Bristow, 228).
This type of media use is representative of a point of criticality
for CUSSGROUP, it is important to understand that this will never be
presented as neatly framed and graphically tidy interfaces to urbanised
South Africa. The content of their artworks are the layers of media found
on a downtown street corner: ripped youtube video’s BlueTooth’ed at
the lowest quality between cell phones; dance tracks shot in backyards;
sneaker selfies and online chats with London in Nigerian internet café’s.
It is important for CUSSGROUP that their audience both see and
experience their work in the environment from which it comes. This is
easily seen even outside of the forms in which their work is presented,
in the group’s VIDEO PARTY events which are video and internet art
exchanges with Europe and the UK presented in downtown electronics
shops and Internet café’s in the guts of Johannesburg and Harare.
The group’s piece in the [Working Title] exhibition, Untitled
(Johannesburg screen saver) is a video screen saver that uses image and
video of downtown Johannesburg housed in a faux computer interface.
The visual implication is that of ‘Google Street View’, this is via the
navigation on the top left. This implication automatically presenting
these views as navigable and digitally voyeuristic in nature. This is in
purposeful contrast to the tongue-in-cheek image compilations moving in
and through each other, referencing the bad graphics of a screen saver.
In reality one would be hard pressed to find navigable interfaces like
Google Street View as screen savers, in doing just this the artists invite
an interrogation of the virtual. The mass of people in the layered and
shifting of images, indicating a seesawing metaphor, between presenting
technology as a universalising entity and the complexity of an African
urbanism. Aligning and comparing these worlds through the “screen
saver”, in so doing asking us as viewers and consumer to question our
own understanding of networked media and this raw reality.
Tegan Bristow for [Working Title] Catalogue
Bristow, Tegan (2013). ‘Half Tiger’: An interrogation of digital and mobile street culture and aesthetic
practice in Johannesburg and Nairobi. Technoetic Arts Journal. Vol. 11. No. 3. p. 221 – 230.
CUSS Group
Lives and works in Johannesburg, Durban and Geneva.
Still image from:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
35. The Swing
MAFIKENG-BORN DONNA KUKAMA is an artist who has not allowed
her practice to be inhibited by specificity: her work is diverse, experimental and
experiential.
Kukama, who won the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist of
the Year Award for Performance in 2014, does not merely ‘stage’ events but
simultaneously critiques them, sometimes through the participation of her
audience and often in unexpected places and spaces.
She uses a variety of methods and media, particularly those that enable
her to interrogate the ideas and rituals of space, from the real to the fictional
and in-between.
With performance as one of her key modes, Kukama brings to life works
that would ordinarily remain two- dimensional, demanding engagement without
giving anything back. Instead, her work requires the complicity of its audience
— complicity that may or may not have a defined outcome, depending on the
moment and, perhaps, the audience. Her work, she explains, “weaves major
aspects of histories, and introduces a fragile and brief moment of ‘strangeness’
within sociopolitical settings.”
Mpho Moshe Matheolane
Donna Kukama
b. 1981, Mafikeng. Lives and Works in Johannesburg.
“...a fragile and brief moment of ‘strangeness’...”
36. The Bridge
NO ESTABLISHING SEQUENCE in Johannesburg today is complete without
a wide shot of the Nelson Mandela Bridge, the 284m-long suspension bridge linking
Braamfontein on its northern end with Newtown (and the CBD) in the south.
The bridge — with its distinctive pylons and multicoloured light display at
night — is regularly invoked as a symbol of hope (much like the man it is named
after). But like many such symbols, here and around the world, the reality of the
thing itself tells another story altogether.
The Bridge — which forms part of a series of sort films produced by Close
Encounters Documentary Laboratory — documents poverty and the struggle to
escape it in contemporary Johannesburg.
It does so by examining the lives of a group of people living around the
bridge. In this part of the town, dreams of a better life usually shatter against the
hard realities of violence and crime. Here it is difficult to find the internal strength
to stand up again, day after day after day, and hope.
Collectively, the series explores the theme of “My Hood”. Film makers
were urged to explore stories within their own communities that reflect the
broader South African narrative.
The series was made possible by a grant from the The National Lottery
Distribution Trust Fund.
Riaan Hendricks
b. 1975, Cape Town. Lives in Cape Town.
“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe...
but not for us.” –Franz Kafka
37. 37
Necktie Youth
ONE OF THE GREAT aspects of the young democratic South Africa has
got to be the myriad methods available for it to be defined and to grow.
A key parallel can be found in the so- called “born-free” generation —
those born after 1994, who are supposedly free of the burdens of the country’s
painful, oppressive past.
Sibs Shongwe-La Mer falls squarely into this contested category: an
almost compulsively energised young man who seeks to express himself in
whatever way he can.
Known primarily as an independent filmmaker, he also uses music, stills
photography, writing and curating as his collective forms of expression. His
style is recognisably vintage (with his preference for black-and-white images),
but the work remains fresh, perhaps because of its determinedly youthful
perspective.
It is not surprising that Shongwe-La Mer does not see South African
youth culture as easily identifiable, but rather as a loose affiliation free to
pursue whatever identities its shifting members find interesting or useful.
In Necktie Youth (86 mins, 2014) he puts his finger on the uneasy pulse
of this generation. And if the film’s seething, compulsive energy is anything to
go by, we can look ahead to a powerful body of work from this complex, multi-
talented artist.
Sibs Shongwe-La Mer
b. 1991, Johannesburg. Lives and Works in Johannesburg.
...an almost compulsively energised young man who
seeks to express himself in whatever way he can.
38. 38
Everyday Politics
ZIMBABWEAN ARTIST Kudzanai Chiurai has been an undeniable force in
the South African contemporary art scene.
From his earliest exhibitions at Sidewalk Café in Sunnyside,
Pretoria, Chiurai made his intentions clear: he was not going to shy away
from politics, regardless of the impact it would have on his personal life.
But the political is personal and vice versa, especially in the
realm of art. It therefore goes without saying that what Chiurai manages
to achieve with his work is at once political and not limited to the political
sphere.
There has also been a clear evolution in his work, from Yellow
Lines (2007) to State of the Nation (2011) and beyond. His mode of practice
has opened up, moving from graphic-art and mixed-media formats to
photography and film.
Peering into Chiurai’s life and practice, as we are allowed to in the
recently released documentary Black President (Mpumelelo Mcata, 2015),
we have the rare opportunity of seeing the artist as fully human, not
merely separate but wholly involved in the everyday politics of life.
Mpho Moshe Matheolane
THE NATION STATE – Ruth Simbao
A confident President stands before her people and presents her State of
the Nation address:
“I greet you in the name of freedom. I am grateful to be able to address
you in this new Republic as your devout new leader”
Chiurai’s works teem with theatrical iterations of fettered lives that
struggle for the freedom of desired utopias, battling against the pitfalls
of power with apocalyptic absurdity.
Warlords. Gender violence. Hierarchy.
A carved royal chair, giant fan and lavish umbrella question seats of
power and point to the incongruity of opulence and filth, sumptuousness
and depravity.
The distance between winning and losing is great.
A pointed finger freezes in the gesture of her naked corpse.
“This Republic is about to be in the hands of its own children”
Mickey Mouse. Hip-Hop cool.
Child soldiers.
“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child”.
The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men…
And when they were up they were (really) up!
The depth of new heights.
Never reached.
“The people of this Republic shall not compromise our liberation, nor
will we be the victims of poor negotiations, miseducation, corruption and
greed. The Republic is not one that eats its young”
What devours us? Who consumes whom?
Neoliberal Revelations, MacDonald’s Last Supper.
“This is my body which is for you. This cup is the covenant in my blood”
(Jesus, President. My covenant, her pledge)
Bring him his briefcase.
Bring her her gun.
“Together as Africans in this new Republic, we have the opportunity to
redefine what it means to be African. In this new Republic your identity
does not dictate whether or not you are to be treated equally”
Spectacle. ‘Africa’. Mediated or mine?
Their hyper, their über,
They own not my pain.
Cult of the personality, or is it just me?
Patrice. Mao. Obama. Moi?
A true picture.
Yet to be found.
Kudzanai Chiurai
b. 1981, Zimbabwe. Lives and Works in Harare.
Still image from:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
...basicallythat’sthedefinition
of life:conflictandresolution.
Rebirth could be a solution
but it is also the potential
start of another conflict.”
39. 39
The Shapes of Power
THE STILLNESS OF the low, rectangular building is matched
by the stillness of the two men resting in its brief midday shadow.
The shot seems to last forever. Silence appears to have overtaken the
world.
It is only when one of the men stands and walks over to a tap
to wash his feet that the viewer remembers that this a film: a moving
image.
Then, over this serene desert scene, flash the following words:
TWO FIGHTER JETS THIS MORNING...
In this moment, from “Le Tchad: True Heart” — a 14-minute film
by South African artist Thenjiwe Nkosi — one feels a tension that can
be detected across the artist’s unfolding oeuvre. Somewhere close,
now if not right-now, maybe even in front of your eyes but invisible
to you, a war is happening: powerful forces are clashing; manifold
structures are continually acting — binding us, linking us, pulling us
apart. These structures cannot be seen directly but they can be read
all around us, all the time, in their effects: in the architecture of our
buildings, in the stories of our border zones, in the faces of our heroes,
from the windows of aeroplanes.
Though always personal and often journalistic, Nkosi’s work
never stops at simple memoir or reportage. Whatever the medium
— her diverse practice includes painting, video and work in the field
of art as a social practice — she is always interrogating power and
the structures it creates, whether political, social or architectural,
and imagining alternatives. As Nkosi herself has asked: What is more
futuristic than a survival strategy?
Border Farm: A Collaboration
THE BORDER FARM PROJECT was conceived by Thenjiwe
Nkosi in dialogue with Zimbabwean writer, farm worker, and community
spokesperson Meza Weza (b. 1976, Maydi, Zimbabwe).
It took place over a year, from 2009 to 2010, on a farm on the
South African / Zimbabwean border, outside the town of Musina.
The project brought together a group of artists from
Johannesburg with artists and other interested participants on a
citrus farm, most of whom were Zimbabwean migrant workers who
had illegally crossed the border from Zimbabwe to South Africa.
Together they developed a film script that spoke about
experiences of illegally crossing the border. Through workshops in
writing, photography, acting and filmmaking they worked towards
producing a film.
BORDER FARM (2011) is that film. It is a docudrama about a
group of Zimbabwean “border jumpers” who make their way across
the Limpopo River from Zimbabwe to seek work on the farms in South
Africa. It portrays the many-layered drama of migration and is written,
acted and crewed by the people who made the journey themselves.
CROSSING (2010) is a single-channel video (duration 04:36)
created from footage from the film.
More than four years on, the Johannesburg-based artists and
those artists on the farm remain in contact.
The project resulted in the formation of The Dulibadzimu
Theatre Group, which is based on the farm. It is still intact and working
using theatre to raise awareness about local issues. Group members
have worked successfully on their own and surrounding farms, and in
the nearby town of Musina, appearing in festivals, films and playing to
other communities.
Daniel Browde
Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi & The
Dulibadzimu Theatre Group
b. 1980, New York. Lives and Works in Johannesburg.
Lives and works in Musina.
What is more futuristic than a survival strategy?
42. 42
Halterland
THERE IS SOMETHING of Albert Camus’ absurdity about the work
of Dan Halter. There is also something of the French Algerian’s metaphor
of the human condition, of Sisyphus (the man condemned by the gods to
forever role a stone up a hill), in the tireless, perpetually recurring acts of
Halter’s production.
Cutting three-millimetre strips out of duplicate media only to
weave them into the same image is, perhaps, literally absurd. But it is the
feeling that these images create, of both familiarity and distortion, that
links them to the existentialist’s notion of absurdity.
Halter, again like Camus, is an exile, an émigré who has crossed
many borders, physical, temporal and political, leaving behind the palpable
land while retaining them only in the unreliable landscapes of memory.
Having been born in Rhodesia and brought up in Zimbabwe, the
son of two Swiss nationals, and having moved to South Africa,
Halter’s references, like Camus’, are of those places seen from a
position of physical exile.
Feelings of displacement and the memories of a lost home have
been ever- present themes in Halter’s work. However unlike in Camus’
lyrical essay “Return to Tipasa” — where at least the feelings of loss are
recoverable in the very stones and ruins of Algeria — for Halter these
feelings and memories of place are now irrevocably distorted. There are
now boundaries — the razor-wired fences and rivers of the political and
technological changes of the last 15 years — between the land as it is now
and those lands of memory.
Perhaps, given Halter’s Swiss origins, it is not unsurprising to find
that the medical condition of Nostalgia (the longing for a home that no
longer exists) was diagnosed first by the Swiss doctor, Albert von Haller,
among Swiss soldiers fighting abroad in the 17th century.
Another Swiss national, the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau,
also noted the specifically Swiss nature of the longing for a lost home. In
fact Rousseau’s whole philosophy was underpinned by the very feeling of a
lost domain and the inability to return the lost ‘natural’ state of man.
But Halter’s work is not this form of pure nostalgia, of a longing
for a lost golden age. It is not an attempt to try to replicate the lost
home and to create the feeling of “authenticity” associated with it. His
works are as much about that feeling of nostalgia as they are about how
distorted these visions and memories become: they suggest the essentially
corrupt nature of memory. Halter, in his pixilated woven images, creates a
distortion of place, rendering an image that is familiar from a distance but
becoming almost entirely unrecognisable the closer one gets.
Like in the most famous Greek nostos (the song or poem of the
homecoming), Odysseus discovers his native country of Ithaca only partly
recognisable and covered in a mist. He finds his wife Penelope cannot
recognise him. The very Penelope who has spent her time in a “labour of
love and endurance — the cloth that she weaves by day and unravels by
night represents a mythical time of everyday loss and renewal.”3
Much like Penelope, Halter and his longtime assistant Bienco Ikete, exiled
from the places of their birth, weave, endlessly creating the distorted
images of a lost and dysmorphic heartland.
Matthew Blackman
3 The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym (2001)
Dan Halter
b. 1977, Zimbabwe. Lives and Works in Cape Town.
In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man
feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since
he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of
a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the
actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
–Albert Camus, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’
43. 43
Jeppe on a Friday
ARE THE EVERYDAY lives and realities of Africans worth
watching?
This is a question that guided the process of making this film.
Is there space to reflect on our contemporary urban realities without
falling into the tropes of “Africans” depicted through the high dramas of
genocide, violence, corruptions and poverty?
Can the contradictions that we know abound in daily life find
space on the screen?
What can we learn about the subtle aspects of life unfolding in
a city like Johannesburg, marked by the everyday human dramas we all
experience?
In Jeppe on a Friday we challenge the spectator to take a
journey into the everyday life of the city, and to set aside assumptions
about what contemporary Johannesburg is or is not. To watch, to
think, and to experience the documentary without prejudice, but with
thoughtfulness.
Jeppe on a Friday is a collaborative documentary, in which
Arya Lalloo and Shannon Walsh invited a team of South African women
directors to look with fresh eyes at the changing neighbourhood of
Jeppestown over the course of one day.
The film takes a subtle approach to capturing the contradictions
and politics of everyday life, particularly as seen through the eyes of
women directors observing the lives of men. Jeppe on a Friday is an
experiment in cinema-direct filmmaking that attempts to push the form
of documentary as well as the way African lives are depicted.
A city can be seen in news reports, crime statistics or the
backgrounds of post- apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters. It can be
explored through guided tours, from behind rolled-up car windows or
through politics and history. In Jeppe on a Friday Lalloo and Walsh bring
together a team to explore a different city: the Johannesburg that beats
in the men who occupy it.
The result is a quiet portrait of five people from Jeppe, a
decayed inner-city neighbourhood. As they grapple with the existential
and mundane over the course of a single day, the characters reveal the
city’s specific textures, as well as universal human experience: familial
love is behind restaurateur Arouna’s success; nostalgia binds Ravi to his
dusty framing shop; ambition drives JJ’s ruthless property development;
tradition is at the heart of Robert’s all-male Zulu choir; and everyday
philosophy gives urban recycler Vusi his momentum.
Part travelogue, part urban allegory, Jeppe on a Friday draws
from a rich tradition of city- centered direct cinema. It offers a record
of life in Johannesburg that demystifies the often maligned male-
dominated metropolis.
(South Africa / Canada, 2012, 87 min). In English & Zulu with English subtitles
Shannon Walsh & Arya Lalloo
b. 1976, Canada.
b. 1980, Durban.
“I see, damn, Jo’burg has changed.... you know it’s not
the same, like before, back in the 90s, you know....”
44. 44
Hillbrow
HILLBROW, ONCE THE playground of Joburg’s young and hip, has
now developed into a densely populated and rather violent working-class
neighborhood.
Nicolas Boone’s film HILLBROW (duration: 32 mins) offers a selection
of local stories that cross over geographical boundaries and whose fictional
characters are portrayed by inhabitants presently living in the neighborhood. In
ten journeys, HILLBROW draws a labyrinth of urban tensions.
A man is on top of a building, under threat, at the edge of the void that
opens behind him, giving on to the city. Then there is another man, crossing the
city on foot, whose walk is interrupted by an attack, presumed to be fatal and
then...
Here we revisit Nicolas Boone’s predilection for neglected urban
environments that are often loaded with stereotypes which he seeks to
undermine.
Here the journey is guided by fictional characters played by local
residents. Ten scenes inspired by stories collected in situ, inscribed in the city
and presenting journeys filmed in long takes, the final one is very gripping. There
is little dialogue in this film in which body language and actions are embodied
in spaces: a supermarket, the street, a car park and wasteland. There is the
omnipresent aspect of walking, whether slowly or urgently, but always as an
inscription in a landscape. And as a backdrop to the violence as a rupture, be it
explicit or underlying, is its counterpoint: the idea of a community that could form
a body.
Nicolas Boone
b. 1974, Lyon, France.
“A man is on top of a building, under threat,
at the edge of the void...”
47. 47
Based in Africa, Young Collectors is a group of young collectors who seek
to support living artists by becoming collaborative patrons in the realisation of
their filmic work.
Born of a passion to support artists beyond a commercial program,
Young Collectors believe in the far reaching potential of film and are invested in
enabling and developing the area of an artist’s work where he/she works with
moving image. Through the production, archiving, documenting and recording of
artist films it aims to open up and engage global channels for artists from Africa
to exchange ideas with the world and vice versa.
Young Collectors is committed to securing the archive of living
artists as a capsule to this moment in time, with a view to ensuring that the
artists’cnarratives will continue to be told in the way that they intended. It is
through their practical assistance with the production of these film projects that
Young Collectors’ understanding of such narratives runs deep.
It is often the case that collectors are disconnected from the artists
whose work they collect. Young Collectors prioritizes collaborative relationships
with each of the artists that it supports. As collaborators they facilitate their
close proximity to the artists, their stories and their ideas so that they may
responsibly share these stories with the world.
Young Collectors is based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Kim Sterne
48. 48
133 Arts endeavors to stimulate a supportive patronage and facilitate projects which
can expose emergent Johannesburg artists and their practices to new audiences,
new markets and new opportunities towards personal and professional growth.
www.133arts.com
The FNB JoburgArtFair is Africa’s leading art fair focused on contemporary
art from the continent and diaspora. Now in its eighth year, it continues to strengthen
this position by presenting the finest of contemporary African art alongside
memorable exhibitions and groundbreaking initiatives.
Since its inception in 2008, Artlogic has set out to grow a sustainable
industry for the arts with a solid base of local and international buyers. Each year,
record sales and visitor numbers reinforce the demand for an event where the
continent’s artists, curators, collectors and enthusiasts can congregate.
Now a vibrant programme of collateral events happens throughout
Johannesburg with galleries, museums, arts organisations and artists collaborating
to create a public focus on city’s art scene.
Special features of the Fair include a series of curated Special Projects, a VIP
Programme that has hosted top international curators and directors from local and
international institutions as well as a Talks Programme that invites art-world figures,
philosophers, and critical theorists to deliver
key-note lectures and participate in panel discussions.
Artlogic welcomes local and international galleries to participate in the Fair
and in particular those that have an interest or link to African Contemporary Art.
www.fnbjoburgartfair.co.za
www.joburg.org.za
