SOUTH AFRICAN CONSULATE GENERAL
CONSOLATO GENERALE DEL SUD AFRICA
OFFICIAL CLOSURE OF THE South AfricaN EXHIBITION at the 55th International Art BIENNALE
The South African Consul-General in Milan, Mr Saul Kgomotso Molobi, as Commissioner of the South African Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition at Venice Biennale, invites all interested parties to the official closing of the South African exhibition Imaginary Fact; Contemporary South African Art and the Archive on 23 November 2013.
The National Arts Festival, curators and managers of South Africa’s pavilion have announced that on this occasion two acclaimed South African artists, Nelisiwe Xaba and Donna Kukama, will perform a pair of specially commissioned pieces and provide the audience with something with which to remember South Africa’s presence in Venice.
Nelisiwe Xaba’s performance, called The Venus in Venice, blurs fact and fiction in a performance that takes the biography of Sara Baartman as its starting point. Sara “Saartjie” Baartman (1790-1815) was a South African Khoikhoi woman who was displayed in 19th century circuses and exhibition shows across London and Paris under the pseudonym Hottentot Venus. Instead of dying in Paris in 1859, Xaba asks the audience to imagine that Sarah Baartman has beend eported back to South Africa under the ruling of Nicolas Sarkhozy. The Venus finds herself lost, no longer allowed in Paris, and alienated from her home life, and makes her way to Venice – where she performs during the Biennale. The Venus in Venice is as much about the artist’s issues with the exoticised black body in contemporary performance and fine art as it is about the exploitation and eroticised body of Saartjie Baartman in Europe in the 1800s.
Donna Kukama will present The Very Last Announcement – a sound-based performance which forms part of a series of works that Kukama has been engaged in over a period of time. All the works in this series have taken place at major exhibition venues and serve Kukama’s enquiry into processes of contemporary art, its construction, its exhibition and its dissemination. For The Very Last Announcement, Kukama has meticulously culled the texts from the visitor’s books in the South African Pavilion, and created an entirely new text derived from the scores of comments it contains. She will speak these through a megaphone during specific times in the final hour of the exhibition, making use of a ruptured narrative and repetition; and volleying her sound work from the edges of the Pavilion, walking on the boundaries of the nation state’s exhibition to remind us that these national frames are also both porous and unreliable.
Xaba and Kukama’s performances will take place at the South African Pavilion in the Arsenale, Sale d’Armi, Building D, on 23 November 2013 at 15:00 and 17:15 respectively.