In this groundbreaking collection of critical essays, 15 writers explore the experimental, interdisciplinary and radically transgressive field of contemporary live art in South Africa. Set against a contemporary South African society that is chronologically 'post' apartheid, but one that continues to grapple with material redress, land redistribution and systemic racism, Acts of Transgression finds a representation of the complexity of this moment within the rich potential of a performative art form that transcends disciplinary boundaries and aesthetic conventions. The collection probes live art's intersection with crisis and sociopolitical turbulence, shifting notions of identity and belonging, embodied trauma and loss, questions of archive, memory and the troubling of colonial systems of knowing, an interrogation of narratives of the past and visions for the future. These diverse essays, analysing the work of more than 25 contemporary South African artists and accompanied by a striking visual record of more than 50 photographs, represent the first major critical study of contemporary live art in South Africa; a study that is as timeous as it is imperative.
Notes
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 30 May 2019).
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART ONE: LIVE ART IN A TIME OF CRISIS
1 Artistic Citizenship, Anatopism and the Elusive Public: Live Art in the City of Cape Town
2 Upsurge
3 'Madam, I Can See Your Penis': Disruption and Dissonancein the Work of Steven Cohen
4 The Impossibility of Curating Live Art
PART TWO: LOSS, LANGUAGE AND EMBODIMENT
5 Corporeal HerStories: Navigating Meaning in Chuma Sopotela's Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda through the Artist's Words
6 'A Different Kind of Inhabitance': Invocation and the Politics of Mourning in Performance Work by Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama
7 State of Emergency: Inkulumo-Mpendulwano (Dialogue) of Emergent Art When Ukukhuluma (Talking) is Not Enough
8 Space is the Place and Place is Time: Refiguring the Black Female Body as a Political Site in Performance
PART THREE: RETHINKING THE RCHIVE, REINTERPRETING GESTURE
9 don't get it twisted: queer performativity and the emptying out of gesture
10 Performing the Queer Archive: Strategies of Self-Styling on Instagram
11 Effigy in the Archive: Ritualising Performance and the Dead in Contemporary South African Live Art Practice
PART FOUR: SUPPRESSED HI STORIES AND SPECULATIVE FUTURES
12 To Heal a Nation: Performance and Memorialisation in the Zone of Non-Being
14 'Touched by an Angel' (of History) in Athi-Patra Ruga's The Future White Women of Azania
15 Performance in Biopolitical Collectivism: A Study of Gugulective and iQhiya
Contributors
List of Illustrations
Index.
ISBN
9781776142804
1776142802
OCLC
1104086690
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