The ICA Podcast

S2E02: Donna Kukama

“I didn't want to become trapped in this cycle of only speaking about violence when speaking of marginalised bodies’ experiences. I wanted to know, also, how we heal, how do we stay afloat? How do we survive? How do we begin to change the narrative, to own the narrative in different ways?”

Visual artist Donna Kukama invites us into her immersive 2018 performance, We the Not-Not People! -Things done, not told. Inscribed, not written. Reflecting on the conception and performance of We the Not-Not People, Kukama explores multiple intersecting forms of oppression, alongside questions of memorialisation and healing.

 

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

 

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

S2E01: Introduction

Welcome to Season 2 of The ICA Podcast! Featuring: Donna Kukama, Gavin Krastin, Nomcebisi Moyikwa, Kopano Maroga, Jay Pather, Athi-Patra Ruga and nomi blum.

We’re doing things a bit differently this Season – offering each episode not as a broad overview of a body of work, but as a deep dive into a single performance.

Over the course of the next 7 episodes, we invite you to encounter 7 remarkable artworks, and to enter into the creative processes that brought them into being. In this introductory episode, get a sneak peek at what lies ahead!

 

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

 

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

Episode 9 (Bonus): Bongani Kona

“When I think of Cape Town, I don't think of the Indian or Atlantic Ocean, or Table Mountain. I think of borders, boundaries, dividing lines which mark territory, and I think of personhood. And the harder, more devastating question, as novelist Madeleine Thien says, of who, here, is allowed to be a person?”

In this bonus episode, our Season 1 finale, we switch focus to bring you the profile of a writer – Bongani Kona. Beginning at a war monument in central Cape Town, and with a public performance that Kona witnessed there in 2010, this episode is about memorialisation, master narratives, home and belonging, and the politics of place and memory. Interspersed with readings from Kona's non-fiction writing, we discuss the history of Zimbabwe as Kona lived it, about immigrating to South Africa, living in Cape Town, and people and things left behind.

Bongani Kona is a writer, editor and co-curator of the Archive of Forgetfulness project. His work has appeared in a variety of places including Chimurenga, Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, The Daily Assortment of Astonishing Things and Other Stories, The Baffler and BBC Radio 4. He was awarded the Ruth First Fellowship in 2019 and shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2016.

 

Music in this episode features the tracks 'Further Discovery', 'Learning from Kids' and 'Emphatic Solace' by Blear Moon, licensed under: CC BY-NC. And by Blue Dot Sessions: An Accumulation, Helmer Sprak, Emmit Sprak, Halpver, Exquisite Motion, Flor Vjell, Kovd and Pull Beyond Pull.

 

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

 

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast and keep an eye on our social media for Season 2, to be released later in the year.

Episode 8: Nkule Mabaso

“Around grade 10, there was this whole drama in the school because of what I felt was different treatment – that when the white girls coloured their hair, so they'd come in one day, their hair’s blonde, next week hair’s red, week three the hair’s black, and nobody says anything…So I coloured my hair ginger. My parents were called in, I was suspended, I was set up for expulsion…So this whole thing stuck to me, of how hair then became this very small symbol for this underlying injustice and unfair treatment.”

Nkule Mabaso, an artist and curator with a Fine Art degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and a Masters in Curating from Zurich University of the Arts, is best known as a curator of visual art. This includes her role as Curator of UCT's Michaelis Galleries – where she curates and coordinates exhibitions, talks and symposiums – as well as major independent projects like the South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which she co-curated with Dr Nomusa Makhubu in 2019.

But in this episode, we explore a critical but lesser-known facet of her diverse practice: Mabaso’s experience creating and curating performative interventions and installations that probe the politics of hair and beauty.

In particular, we dive into her 2012-2013 performance The Black Threat, a collaboration with artist Maninzi Kwatshube, starting with a walk through Cape Town’s CBD to re-visit the site where the work intervened into the public life of the city in March of 2013.

 

Music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions: Careless Morning; Smooth Stone; Steadfast and The Summit.

 

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

 

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.

Episode 7: Meghna Singh

“My stories, my way of expressing always comes in these very strong images. And then I always think of, what would it make the other person feel? More than think, what would it make the other person feel? Is it a kind of precarity? Is it nostalgia? Is it missing?... What it means to not be in a place you're so familiar with which is home – I think that is something very personal. And then in a choice of stories, when I find something which plays on this personal aspect, then I pursue that.” 

Visual artist Meghna Singh, whose immersive environments draw on video and installation, documentary and fiction, invites us into three such installation-based works – Arrested Motion, The Rusting Diamond and the 180-degree virtual reality film, Container – which foreground her academic and personal interests in oceanic flows of trade, labour and migration; abandoned spaces and lives; historical and contemporary servitude, and the meaning of home. 

 

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

 

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.

Episode 6: Sikhumbuzo Makandula

“It's almost like you become an intercessor of particular stories, where your responsibility is to illuminate certain histories. But also, one of the things that I've learned with this form of working is to do with how one is named, really. My name is Sikhumbuzo Sizwe Makandula. My two names ‘Sikhumbuzo Sizwe’ speaks to: be the one who reminds the nation."

We dive into two works by visual and performance artist Sikhumbuzo Makandula, Ingqumbo (2016) and Ingoma ka Tiyo Soga (2018-2019), to interrogate the areas of academic and artistic enquiry that have shaped – and which continue to propel – his deeply layered artistic practice: the violence of the missionary agenda in South Africa and its lasting effects, how to negotiate the intersecting influences of Christianity and African spirituality, and the necessity of excavating silenced historical narratives.

“The work really starts with music, before I even get to the image,” Makandula explains – and this powerful soundscape that inspires his work and fills his performances also threads its way through our conversation as we journey between Makandula’s art studio, the South African National Gallery, and the Eastern Cape town of Makhanda.

 

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

 

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.

Episode 5: Dean Hutton

“If there’s anything that I’m trying to decode in my work, it’s power. And my understanding of power as it relates to my body, as it relates to my intersections of power, and oppression – and how they work together to create this context in which I live.”

We trace the trajectory of Dean Hutton’s artistic practice from their early career as a photojournalist at the Mail & Guardian, to their experiments with self-portraiture, the birth of their performance avatar, Goldendean, and the realisation of – and vast range of responses to – their infamous 2016-2018 work, FuckWhitePeople. Hutton reflects on how, at each turn, their practice has been informed and propelled by their experience of growing up in apartheid South Africa, and of living as a “Fat Queer White Trans body” visibly and vocally resisting hegemonic whiteness.

 

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

 

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.

Episode 4: Khanyisile Mbongwa

“I feel and think and know and have encountered that, for as long as I can remember, we've been negotiating ways of dying. We have been told that like, you know, you're here, you're born to work so that you can die. You can't leave anything behind. Colonialism, apartheid robbed us of all our legacies…And when somebody does that, it’s them saying to you, you're not allowed to be alive. And so what does it mean when a black person says: I want to live?”

In an alleyway alongside her mother’s home in Gugulethu, curator Khanyisile Mbongwa talks through her work on irhanga (township alleyways) as a public space for black self-realisation and self-love. We also unpack Mbongwa’s 2017 demonstration kuDanger! and her 2016 collaboration with Urban Village in Soweto. In between, Mbongwa reflects on her transition from artist to curator, and why she resists the term ‘performance’.

 

For more music by Urban Village see www.urbanvillage.live or follow the band on Instagram.

 

To watch Marco Casino’s film Staff Riding about train surfing see www.vimeo.com/83486021. For more works by Marco Casino, follow him on Instagram.

 

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

 

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.

Episode 3: Chuma Sopotela

“For me, the process of research doesn’t stop because I’m performing. I am still that whirlwind. My pores are still wide open for information.”

In today's episode, we accompany artist and activist Chuma Sopotela to the venue where her 2018 work Untitled was first performed, and then to the recording studio to discuss the influences and inspirations of her early career, her introduction to live art in 2007, and her seminal work Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda. With academic and practitioner Lieketso Mohoto-wa Thaluki, ICA Director Jay Pather, and Sopotela herself, we think through the tension between a cerebral and visceral experience of Sopotela’s performances, and why the failure of language to hold her work might offer productive possibilities.

 

Lieketso Mohoto-wa Thaluki’s chapter ‘Corporeal HerStories: Navigating Meaning in Chuma Sopotela’s Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda through the Artist’s Words’ appears in the edited collection Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa published by Wits University Press.

 

For more music by Elvis Sibeko, follow him on Instagram and Facebook.

 

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

 

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.

Episode 2: Lesiba Mabitsela

"And what I'm referencing is this idea of perceived or created masculinities. You are creating an individual. I've always thought that fashion is that. It's a conveyor belt of looks, of ideas of how you are going to see yourself in the future."

Fashion designer and artist Lesiba Mabitsela discusses three of his performative works, as well as his early influences and intersecting interests in fashion, masculinity and religion. We also speak to academics and curators who have experienced Mabitsela's work. Read more about Lesiba Mabitsela: www.lesibamabitsela.wixsite.com/artist.

 

For more music by Amy Turk, see: www.youtube.com/amyturkharp.

 

The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.

 

Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.