(Blind
Spot featuring Mohau Modisakeng. Pic Inzilo)
The 40th National Arts Festival
will be held in Grahamstown from July 3 to 13, 2014, offering an awe-inspiring
number of events across the arts. Herewith information on the Main Festival’s
Performance Art programme:
THE
MUSEUM OF NON-PERMANENCE
(est. 2014) Grahamstown
2014 Standard Bank Young Artist for
Performance Art, Donna Kukama, realised when she was about 12 that she might be
an artist. She thought then that she wanted to be a painter, but her subsequent
explorations have led her increasingly towards the production of art that is
experience-based – both for herself and her audience – and often located in
‘unusual’ everyday contexts.
An integral member of the Centre for
Historical Re-enactments, much of Kukama’s work explores contemporary
understandings of history; always accompanied by a consideration of meaning and
questions around value; and reflection on the personal, in the context of the
political. Teaching in the School of Arts at the University of the
Witwatersrand allows her the opportunity to ground her work – which is often
fleeting and ephemeral – in academic practice.
At the National Arts Festival, Donna will
launch The Museum of Non-Permanence,
a series of events, encounters, interactions, and public announcements taking
place over a set amount of time in various public sites. Donna’s Museum of Non-Permanence acknowledges
history as a physical experience; one that is carried by “historical scars”
which need not be exposed, yet require processes of careful dissection in order
for imagined realities to exist beyond the historical. It takes the form of a
journey that is not only an interruption, but needs to be interrupted in order
to continue.
Although The Museum of Non-Permanence will be inaugurated in Grahamstown,
Donna intends that the Museum will continue to function as a mobile structure,
morphing in various environments beyond the Festival.
BLIND
SPOT
Blind Spot is a collaborative collection of
four site-situational performance works curated by Ruth Simbao, which
acknowledge what we don’t see and grapple with some of the things we think we
see. Vision is not simply what we see, and seeing is far from inert. With every
look we dissect, avoid, grab, twist, freeze, stab or possess. Invisibility
tumbles into hyper-visibility. We obscure. We label. We fumble in the dark, as
we think we know what we see:
Scotoma: Greek for
darkness, this is an obscuration of the visual field. Termed a blind spot, it
is an area with no photoreceptor cells, creating an absence of vision that can
only be detected when one eye is closed. Metaphorically, it can be said that
one has a blind spot when one is ignorant, prejudiced, biased or unappreciative
of something or someone. Just as with scotoma, the brain makes up certain
details that are not actually there, and cultural or cognitive biases rely on
farcical information and skewed perspectives. Cognitive biases include
stereotyping, irrational ideas based on essentialism, the ‘curse of knowledge’
when one becomes unable to consider supposedly less-informed perspectives, or a
status quo bias, which is the difficultly in accepting change.
Barongwa:
Produced as part of Blind Spot, Barongwa is created and performed by
Mohau Modisakeng, with Sikhumbuzo Makandula. It features the procession of a
silent marching band through the streets of Grahamstown, from the centre of
town to the site of the old Egazini Memorial in Fingo Village. Imaginary sound
reignites a sensitive history marked by deprivation, emphasising the fact that
we can only see when we fully recognise our blindness.
Bismillah:
Igshaan Adams is an installation, mixed-media and
performance artist whose works speak to his experiences of racial, religious
and sexual liminality in South Africa. Opening up anticipated ways of seeing
and being seen, Adams draws from tensions and complexities within his own
cultural background and iconographies of Islam. In the Blind Spot performance
titled Bismillah, Adams performs with
his father, Amien, who prepares his body for burial in the Islamic cleansing
and wrapping ritual, as if he had died.
What
Difference Does It Make Who Is Speaking?: Mbali
Khoza engages with performance, video and installation in order to translate
and express her understanding of language and literature as a mode of
communication. The act of stitching is an important trope in her work, and is
inspired by Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera who, in his novella House of Hunger, compares the act of
writing to a violent stitching of a wound: “As I read it, every single word
erased itself into my mind. Afterwards they came to take out the stitches from
the wound of it .The stitches were published. The reviewers made obscene
noises”.
Drawing from Foucault’s lecture “What is an Author?” Khosa’s Blind Spot
performance What difference does it make
who is speaking? questions authorship and the violent invisibility caused
by translation, as language is altered and deleted. Surrounded by the three-dimensional blocks of
text at the Eastern Star Press Museum that in the past were meticulously
arranged by hand, Khoza carefully performs a stitched transcription of a West
African language using isiZulu phonetics as a guide.
Everse:
Everse is an obsolete word meaning to subvert or overthrow. The live
installation Everse is a
site-situational, spatial walk-about at Victoria Primary School which engages
with the blind spots of spaces of learning and the long-term repercussions
these can have ideologically, socially, politically and philosophically. The
audience is invited to engage with the collectively nostalgic yet subjective
memories of schooling, and extrapolated elements and issues of the education
system are highlighted, unhinged and subtly critiqued.
This live
installation with Simone Heymans, Ivy Kulundu-Gotz, Joseph Coetzee and Chiro
Nott is produced as part of Blind Spot - an extension of a series of public
interventions installed for the duration of the Festival.
Bookings
for the 2014 National Arts Festival can now be made online through the website –
click on the banner advert above or go to www.nationalartsfestival.co.za Programmes are available on the
website or free printed copies at Exclusive Books as Gateway
and Westville.
The following Standard Bank branches also
have copies: Amanzimtoti Galleria, Durban North, Empangeni, Gateway Agency,
Hillcrest, Kingsmead Branch, Kloof, La Lucia, Margate, Musgrave Road,
Newcastle, Port Shepstone Pavilion, Pietermaritzburg, Pinetown, Umhlanga,
Westville.
The
National Arts Festival is sponsored by Standard Bank, The National Lottery
Distribution Trust Fund, Eastern Cape Government, Department of Arts and
Culture, City Press and M Net.
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