Artist moves out of bounds
AN architect by profession, Doung Anwar Jahangeer crossed over to a career in the arts after taking a walk to Warwick Triangle in Durban. Since then he has travelled the world as a performance artist.
Jahangeer, from Mauritius, decided to call Durban his home after he came here in 1992 to study architecture.
Today he is a renowned performance artist, who is determined to use the arts to spread social awareness.
He will perform Out of Body at the Fresha Festival in Durban this week.
He explained his journey into arts and drama: “I became disillusioned by architecture as a profession because it’s disconnected from people and people’s lives – how they feel and how they make a home for themselves.
“One day, in 2000, I decided to walk from Musgrave Road down to the Warwick Triangle.
“I was also driven to do this by the racial atmosphere I found myself in at the time, where I was constantly being told that I shouldn’t go to certain places, that I should be careful of certain people.
“This added to the frustration that led me to take that walk exactly where people told me not to go,” he said.
“During that walk, I started to see my world differently. I started to look through the crack of society, through the crack of the established system.
“And in this crack, I started to become more aware of this intense creativity that comes from there, and this is what inspired me to pursue a more artistic career.
“My work on this artistic platform touches on and questions and critiques how we are naturally imaginative in the way that we live our lives.”
Jahangeer has performed around the world and has opened the Fresha Festival for the past three years.
This year he will perform his work Out
of Body.
“This performance deals with the concept of missing, of a void, of emptiness, of an unknown. Out of Body is part of a series of work and this edition is one of seven editions performed in Frankfurt, in Addis Ababa, in Grahamstown and in New York.
“All of the work addresses some kind of collapsing of binaries, both practical and spiritual.”
Jahangeer said the main material used to bind the series conceptually was red clay called Mbovu.
“Mbovu is a popular African cultural practice that is practical, used almost every day here in South Africa where the red clay is applied on the face to protect it from the sun.
“But it is also used as a way to indicate a form of passage, a form of transcending connection that is happening between the spiritual world and the material world.
“It demonstrates the idea of a connection that is in process. So this series deals with the collapsing of binaries black/white, rich/poor, he/she, us/them – so both political and personal.
“It’s really about the self and other and the idea of difference.”
In Out of Body, he looks at the personal experience.
“The spiritual experience of losing someone, the binary concept between life and death, which is ultimate in everybody’s life and death. It is an absolute that is constructed in such fixed categories that we become afraid of death.
“It is true that losing somebody is very painful and that loss in itself is a kind of death in itself.
“But Out of Body is asking us to think of a bridge between life and death, think of a ritual that could maybe help us understand that this void is a space where metamorphosis takes place, a metamorphosis from the personal into the spiritual.”
Jahangeer will perform Out of Body on January 19 and 20 at 1pm at Durban North Beach as part of the Fresha Festival. Visit www.freshafestival.co.za.