JOMBA!

Red Eye’s back to launch Jomba! 2010

Principally funded by The National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund, JOMBA! joins forces for the first time with the innovative and cutting-edge concept of Red Eye at the Durban Art Gallery on September 3 at 18h00. Renowned for showcasing performance art, fashion, dance, music and everything in between, this special JOMBA! edition of Red Eye, which is part of the Celebrate Durban season, promises to dazzle audiences.

Featuring almost a hundred performers and based around the notion of "The Body Politic", artists from all genres of performance and art making have been commissioned and invited to generate work that explores both the heightened body political but also the more personal and intimate body. Choreographers, dancers, fashion designers, DJs, fine artists, tattoo artists, performance-based artists, bands and one or two rather edgy individuals all come together in the unique vision of curator David Gouldie who has promised audiences a night of site-specific interactive performances that they will never forget.

Audiences will arrive to a blocked-off Smith Street with the "I heart market" allowing the audience an opportunity to mingle and buy food and the odd trinket. All the while, mobile interactive dance performances will weave in and about the road; gumboot dancers, ballerinas and waltzing figures with trolleys and overhead, hanging mobile artworks suspended on cranes fill in the spaces around stages giving the audience a feast of visual stimulation.

“We ask the audience to wander through the various DAG gallery spaces in no particular order discovering performances and a never ending unfolding of surprises. We ask you to take the time to ponder the voices of the artists, enjoying the unexpected and leave feeling challenged,” says David Gouldie.

Some of the extensive list of performers and artists creating work especially for this Red Eye JOMBA! include Spit Munkey collaborating with Durban Music School, Bernice Stott, Jabu Siphika, Sanele Mzinyane, The fabulous Kevin Ellis, Liezel Prins, Mlondi Zondi, Warren Raysdorf, ewok, Sifiso Khumalo, Karen Logan, Mark Hawkins and Toni Morkel, and not forgetting Sandile Mkhize, Nkanyiso Kunene , Mxolisi Nkomonde and Umucyo Cultural Group Rwandan Dancers. The After-Party will be hosted by the Zulu lounge and will feature top Cape Town bands Plastics and Popskarr

The University of KwaZulu-Natal's Centre for Visual Art exhibition, which will be displayed in Gallery Four, will be an eclectic mix of very differing styles of art-making. The 18 artists displaying their work include:

- Printmakers such as Kim Forfar, who uses etching plate in a very unusual way, as can be seen in her piece entitled Invocation of the muse; Heather Pattenden who screen prints onto fabric in Bodybag and Ties that bind; Sharon McClelland who works with texture and embossing on paper in The body imperfect; Muziwandile Gigaba who works with the dialogue between two opposing prints in his The eye and crosses the full river and Natalie Fossey's screen print Marriage-a-la-Modem; The Inspection.

- Ceramicists such as Kim Bagley who creates fragmented, rock-like metaphorical vessels in her work Fondre; Elizabeth Ramsey who explores fragility in her paper clay and printmaking techniques entitled Otherness and Sharon Weaving's very unusual, purposely-slumped ceramics called Filter.

- Multi-media art: Rifka S. Kirsten with her multi-substance wire bras entitled restriction, Nic Crooks with his Paradox of Identity, which is comprised of his face vacuum-formed in various colours and Elizabeth Wang who combines multi-media with digital prints in Envelopes.

- Digital and interactive works produced on screen by the Digital Department within the university, as well as a work by Wesley Flanagan, displayed in a light box entitled Here we Stand.

There will be a strong fashion contingent featuring models from Ice Models and designers Jane Wolff, Dale McCarthy, David Fenn, Stephanie Duchenne, Lungile Mkhize, Michaella Goss and Dark Child.

Red Eye JOMBA! tickets are R50 per person and are only available at the Durban Art Gallery on the night of the September 3 from 18h00.

Making JOMBA! possible are a range of funders and partners. The National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund has come on board as principle funder for JOMBA!, with valued support from the National Arts Council, the City of Durban, HIVOS, Pro-Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland, Karbardock, and other kind partners.