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Karoo Disclosure
Karoo Disclosure explores notions of heritage, culture, ownership, and legitimacy in the context of external economic and political drivers that threaten to change the Karoo landscape and the lives of it’s communities in unforeseen ways.
Karoo Disclosure, a collaborative art installation investigated the highly contentious issue of fracking. This installation was exhibited at Iziko’s South African Museum from August 29 until the November 15, 2015.
The installation included the Karoo Disclosure film, that was shown at Iziko Museum Night, That Art Fair and selected for the Karoo Indy Film Festival, alongside the photographic works and Karoo specimens from the Iziko Museum collections.
The opening of Karoo Disclosure also featured a discussion panel on the issue led by experts in anthropology, climate change, art and natural science including WWF’s energy expert, Saliem Fakir, UCT Anthoplogy Professor Lesley Green, UCT Art Professor Virginnia MacKenny and art theorist Andrew Lamprecht.
The collaborating artists included: Deborah Weber, Damien Schumann, Elgin Rust, Gina Waldman, Margaret Stone, Maxim Starcke, Lisa Bauer, Michelle Liao, Tom Glenn, Peet van Heerden, Hendrik Dudumashe and Paula Kingwill
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Translation Games
In April 2013 I collaborated with artist, Elgin Rust and fellow photographer, Trevor Adeline on Translation Games. It was a response to the current media hype produced by the ever increasing reports of violent gender crimes and their subsequent trials in South Africa. These often very violent cases, flood media platforms positioning the judiciary in the lime light. The public not only watches to see “justice being done”, it actively judges perpetrators and victims based on the continual information released. Television, news, newspaper articles, online blogs and twitter feeds translating legal jargon and performances for public consumption. This performative collaboration investigated the unpredictability and circular nature of the translation processes.
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Swallow My Pride
This four month project was initiated and co-curated by myself, Dale Washkansky,Lizza Littlewort and William Martin. The group show featured work by Zanele Muholi, Andrew Putter, Pierre Fouche and Werner Ungerer, Ernst Van der Wal, Lizza Littlewort,Robert Hamblin, Linda Stupart, Anne Historical, Julie Donald, Kai Lossgott, Jody Paulsen, Igshaan Adams, Genevieve Louw and Johke Steenkamp, Tony East, William Martin, Lindsay Nel, and Andrea Brand.
SMP was exhibited at Blank Projects.“Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed deejay
Because the music that they constantly play
IT SAYS NOTHING TO ME ABOUT MY LIFE.”
The Smiths, Panic.“Like Morrissey’s outburst against the irrelevance of the mainstream disco scene to his lived experience of gay London in the ’80s, Swallow My Pride was a visceral response to the commercialisation of gay culture in Cape Town. The title subverts the slogan Gay Pride, once an urgent call to march and make visible the diversity and difference of local queer culture. Now Gay Pride commodifies gay experience into a market run lifestyle option in “post-gay” society, where pink money buys acceptance into the hetero-normative capitalist hierarchy.
This constructed stereotype is not only conservative, inhibited and achingly dull; crucially it dismisses the real-life diversity of the gay community, where issues of race, poverty, religion, discrimination and self-acceptance continue to be a daily struggle.
The commitment from the contributors to this show generated exciting work. A powerful interweaving emerged of the personal and the political in contemporary gay South Africa. As the commodified gay stereotype was subverted, so too the conservative aesthetic conventions which construct this stereotype were pulled apart and questioned in a witty and innovative critique of mainstream art. The wide range of work included photography, painting, drawing, video, animation, installation, intervention and anti-art strategies, and brought into focus the courage, suffering, humour, intelligence and enormous variety of local queer culture.” (Lizza Littlewort)
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