Showstopper Ruga sets Performa 17 in mo
Last week South African artist AthiPatra Ruga performed at a gala event in New York, held to honour curator and writer Okwui Enwezor and to introduce the theme for next year’s Performa 17 Biennale, Beloved Country.
Performa 17, which begins in November next year, is the biggest and most anticipated performance art fair in the world. Last week’s one night only show saw the cream of the international art world’s crop, including Enwezor, artist Carrie Mae Weems, curator and art dealer Jeffrey Deitch and artist and photographer Cindy Sherman in attendance.
For Ruga’s piece, a procession of “choristers” and brass band members, which included rapper Dope Saint Jude and artist Angel–H0, dressed in white robes, hats and golden gloves, marched and sang in step formation, led by a duo holding one of Ruga’s tapestries.
The performance culminated with a spiritual iteration of Makubenjalo, the devastating finale of the original ending to Nkosi Sikel’ iAfrika, with performers’ fists in the air. The New York Times’ Hilary Moss described the performance as “beyond brilliant”.
Ruga spoke to the Mail & Guardian after the performance. This is my second Performa commission. My first was a production that I put together entitled Ilulwane, a tribute to all the boys who die in the Eastern Cape from ukwaluka and those who survive the cicrcumcisions.
This was in 2011. My relationship with the organisation stretches back to the day I met Roselee Goldberg, the [Performa] founder and a fellow South African. This was in Johannesburg during the anti-African xenophobic shutdown of 2008. I was then approached at the beginning of the year to kick off the programme for the 2017 bienniale, which focuses on investigating the arts of South Africa and, of course, the diaspora. The purpose of the evening was to honour an icon in African contemporary art, Mr Okwui Enwezor, and celebrate post-apartheid art production from home. I was commissioned to not only do a performance but to craft the evening’s look and feel. We then presented our piece, titled Over the Rainbow, which was an emotive procession and concluded with a finale that debuted our new avatar, The Versatile Queen Ivy. To have been in a room where the front audience were literally icons of the industry, people who inspire me to get to studio and whose inspiration gives me the stamina I pride my studio in — yho! — was just a moment that left me humbled and thankful to my ancestors (especially my mother who I last saw in 2003) for getting me there. The title alludes to the Rainbow Nation, a name bestowed on postapartheid South Africa by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
I made a work that celebrates the hopefulness of the post-apartheid era while also making references to the Wizard of Oz, camp/alternative marchers, Xhosa choral tradition and the existing racial tensions that might be sugar-coated by rainbowism in lieu of true societal transformation.
My performance introduced NYC to the next generation of artists —Angel-H0, Dope Saint Jude and Vuyo Sotashe — coming up in South Africa and will culminate in a show-stopping musical and video revue of influences and key South African cultural and musical movements, including the emergence of kwaito, guz music, gqom and the participatory political chants and songs of umzabalazo (freedom songs) from the apartheid and #MustFall eras. My responsibility is not to teach per se but to encourage the audience to rise to the occasion and to feel a self-confidence to soak in the work and then it’s up to them to consult Google and find out the genesis of the piece. This encourages a flow of conversation instead of a didactic framework that disempowers them ultimately. Angelo is the youngest, born two weeks before the 1994 elections in South Africa. He doesn’t have that much of an emotional connection to the euphoria of that event, therefore he has a perspective that is reflective of his generation — which has finally broken the spell of the new South Africa.
And this is reflected in the unprecedented student revolution that is the #FeesMustFall movement that aims at a total decolonisation of how art and education is conceptualised and how that informs our respective
“My responsibility is not to teach per se but to encourage the audience to rise to the occasion and feel a self-confidence to soak in the work”