"St Bartholomea" | 2010 | photo: Kiki Taira
Performance Works
Forgetting Borders & Releasing Chimeras:
Performance Actions by Nathalie Mba Bikoro
Community, society, mythology, heritage, authenticity and subcultures are the central themes of the works oscillating between realities and the fantasy worlds. Making mixed media conceptual works primarily through the mediums of performance and video, Bikoro is not a studio artist. Her preferred place of production are the streets collecting through photography that breaks away from reportage and live actions that become political narratives and interventions responding to the spaces she encounters. In live settings, the work can be read as an appeal for intervention or as a place to consider alternatives. In this environment she draws her materials from the surroundings of everyday life and questions the meaning of things by translating and transforming narratives and senses of everyday life by investigating notions of ‘communitas’. Exploring the questions of how we define society, what mechanisms hold us together, and what role politics, taboos and traditions play in this process. The works deal with self-negations, cultural identity, and nationalism with opposition to methods of anthropological structures whilst delivering the potential for performativity as a means of resistance.
Since 2011, Mba Bikoro alters documents such as passports, postage stamps, banknotes and visa entry stamps, with the aim of disrupting state systems of representation and identification and generating propositions about belonging and body politic. In 2012, the artist publicly burns her three passports in Berlin in a live performance titled Brushing Borders: Homage to Mandela. Whilst erasing her identity she generates a much stronger sense of identity and power through a passage of ‘baptisation’ by drinking 7 litres of red wine throughout the passages in which she has to write an oath of birth before burning each passport which states her desires for individual freedom in faith and belief outside the confines of imagined traditions of church or state laws. One expects that she refers to historical events in the rise of political conflicts and fascism, particularly denoting relations to power constructions. By burning her passports she confirms the struggle between traditions and modernity, heritage and authenticity, belonging and faith. Her legacy is one of many that keep performing throughout communities of the unsettled conflicts of race and identity, institutional constraints and migratory conflicts. She is both breaking the black and white voodoos from her childhood, inciting a kind of exorcism performed through ritual references constructed through colonial encounters. It also explicitly makes reference to accusation, persecution and displacement of peoples in the Second World War and denoting the destructiveness of apartheid in South Africa.
In Brazilia, Mba Bikoro burned Francs CFAs and Reals currency notes in front of the National Bank of Brazil during the FLAAC event in 2012 including a residency with Corpos Politico Informaticos. The action Without Sanctuary reflects on our complete dependency and value on abstract forms of power as well as questioning the lack of human rights concerns within the Brazilian authorities towards ethnic diversity and heritage. It is an action punishable by law in Latin America as well as in parts of West African countries. Following a participatory intervention from the public, the artist follows onto creating a golden flag made of African wax sewn on her arm, waves it in front of the bank quarters and runs along the length of the street. Slowing down she walks barefoot with the waving flag and her feet are slowly burned from the excrutiating heat of the city. She resumes the action after her feet and body can no longer bare the pain. At the same time, the artist was involved in local protests about the human rights of indigenous peoples of Brazil who’s territories and homes are being overtaken by new government regimes of capitalist re-developments. There was a haunting message left by Bikoro; the currency the authorities invest/burn is eventually the destruction of a peoples’ heritage and future relations/survival. Governments are ready to spend billions to displace and erase communities and histories that are becoming increasingly faded to Brazilian identity which prevents the country from future dialogues with other communities and races and the development of a creolised nation. The displacement and erasure of the indigenous peoples means that in fracturing the links between tradition and modernity, a dangerous fascist nationalism becomes embedded in the peoples’ consciousness and heritage becoming void. The flag emblem of a nation, illustrates the impossibility of creolisation and resolution. Both a symbol of mixed nations, the gift, mixed races and new-independence, the latter betrays its own mission and hope. Waved in front of the bank and marathoned across the streets critiques the impossibility of a united community, its frustrations and the irresponsibility of leading governments and institutions on their duty to serve their populations. We have betrayed our own promises for a contemporary future that has turned into a modern crisis.
In her residency in Brazil’s Perpendicular programme in Belo Horizonte, the artist was arrested in the favela of Santa Lucia. After performing The Middle Passage (2011), the actions raised controversies particularly amongst the female community, raising the alarm that an ‘African nyanga’ came to corrupt and make ill rituals against the community. Suspending three chickens above a roof covered with gold and replacing their skins with gold pigments delivered an aggressive image that deployed stereotypes based on myths about a people that the local community knew little about or were completely disconnected from.
The final resolve was to open a multi-dialogue through a participatory performance with Folds (2011). The concept was to resolve the disputes and stereotypes that both favela and the middle class communities in the rich city had between each other and Folds used a creative form to channel this dialogue, encounter and collaboration. People were invited to create paper boats, as a poetic symbol for the slave trade boats and the sea as the 1st passages for encounter between peoples of the world. At nightfall participants were invited to release the boats with a candle inside of them into the lake that separates both communities. The central meeting point to both parties, the lake became a lake of fire, floating lights that held the wishes and dreams delivered and sent into the paper boats by the community. Connecting divided communities with the same wishes and aspirations for the future, those thoughts travel the water and its lights reflecting the light of the stars in the sky above, the last map and navigation back to home. Illustrating the hope that both communities remember that they are from the same home and are responsible for each other because their aspirations remain the same.
Again these works on cultural crossings and dialogues progress form earlier performance video works such as Volcano Dig (2007) using a converging voice dialogue between an operatic female voice and an Islamist male chanter in dialogue. It is a short story about love, that includes the role of oppressive institutions upon local populations and the role of women strongly takes primary feature. We see women with faces covered in black veils performing daily house cleaning chores inside a volcano whose actions dangerously resembles the theatrical tortures of Abu Graib. In the end the voices converge and their voices become the beats of distanced echoed gunshots which are actually the slow dancing footsteps of a waltz between a man and a woman.
Through another relationship, StasiDuck Live Opera (2007-11) is an online performance project reflecting on the role between the sender and the receiver as both performers, anonymous and creating spaces of tension, trust, danger, play and seduction. It makes use of the memory and duration of panoptic law described by Foucault where the artist performs live actions through the commands or comments of invited audiences through live web interaction, where Bikoro can only be seen through a digital screen and she can only receive messages through a private studio on a large tv screen reading the reactions. Systematically nothing is performed to the literal sense, as the aim is to transform the live requests into unexpected forms of language, deconstruct narratives of the aesthetic and investigate dimensions of collaboration and action. In the end the project defies the system of power relations between a ‘master and slave’ dynamic, disorientates and fractures the logic of senses by constructing new forms of ambiguous encounter and dialogue.
Some of these elements are re-explored later in Causality 2011 when the artist’s presence is absent and only remains a blank space with a telephone, which the audience must answer when it rings. This time the artist sends instructions or texts that the participant must enact or simply reflect on. Similarly during the online performance piece Autopsy (2010) in Cape Town, participants interacted online with the artist and exchanged stories and sense-touch actions which were drawn blindfolded and sent by mail to the participants as abstract portraits of themselves. Or again, Ezekiel’s Bread/Positioning Osmotic Impulses (2012) offers baked bread made out of human faeces that is left on a table with a knife. Making reference to the prophet Ezekiel warning of society’s ills and abandon for communication.
Both the White Lily Commandments (2011) and NonIdentity (2011) investigated the erasure and re-interpretation of slavery symbols both used by the old French Empire. On the body of the artist remains two tattoos; one with the symbol of the white lily flower tattooed on African slaves by French colonialists and a slave ship 19th century engraving remastered and following the direction back to the African continent.
We Cannot Do It Without The Rose (2012) articulates the concept of social sculpture through human belief, resistance and forgiveness explained by Joseph Beuys and presents a homage to the activists of the White Rose movement such as Sophie Scholl fighting against Nazi fascism during the second World War in Germany. The artist was sent to perform in the Berlin’s Neukoln former prison cleaning the dirty hallways with white t-shirts. With two buckets, she dips the shirt in the water and swipes the floor of the cell hallway until the shirt is black with dirt. Then she dips the t-shirt in the bucket of red wine and puts the t-shirt on her body. She repeats the action for another two hours amounting to ten t-shirts that she is wearing on her body. Exiting outside, one by one she takes off the t-shirts and soaks out the remaining liquid of wine and dust into her mouth and drinks it, at times choking and vomiting the liquid. The shirts are laid on the floor in a line in the closed courtyard.
Integral to the artist’s concepts is the return to the body, the one that speaks first with all its senses. During her ten-year battle with leukaemia cancer in early childhood, the artist underwent long-term therapies that included creative outputs which became permanent forms of language and processes with her thinking, communication and interaction with others.
Today this healing process is translated through the use of voice and body in the performative encounters of every day life. From earlier works such as St Bartholomea (2009) the artist is witnessed licking the floors in the fashion of a cross and eating chorizo sausage spitting them out on the ground and re-chewing them consecutively for long periods of hours as seen in EatWordEat (2006) during a residency in Spain’s Galician region of Pontevedra. Key features from Pontevedra works includes a performance focusing on survival in forests where the artist lived in isolation and used the excrements of her own body to make portraits thrown onto canvas and creating webs of black cotton threads within parts of the forests. In Last Independence series Mbolo (2010) the artist is featured with white cooking flour exiting out of her mouth creating cloud dusts in the air or breath drawings on the ground (Holy Mess & Dirty Sermons | 2010) whilst she speaks Fang to the audience and follows toward a ritual of memorial celebration that includes burning her grandmother’s dress. These are later pronounced with gold dust flying through her breaths as well as eating and spitting white lily flowers (The Uncomfortable Truth | 2010), writing and licking black-charcoaled calendar dates to fill white walls into black holes (Female Genital Mutilation | 2008), spitting golden leaf apples from buckets of water (The White Lilly Commandments | 2011), eating black and red cotton threads and vomiting the contents form her mouth (Trinity & Open The Gate | 2011), drinking a row of seven litres of red wine in between writing oaths and burning her passports ((B)rushing (B)orders | 2012), and taking mouth-falls of large iron nails out of suspended goats’ hearts (Middle Passage & Passage Deves | 2011-12). Unquestionably these actions can be reflected as ‘exorcisms’ and exercising her memory out of particular traumas.
In St Louis, Senegal, Bikoro inaugurates a new street by the name of Passage Deves (2012). The event was marked by a performance where the artist marathons in the same street between two suspended goats’ hearts in which her task is to remove crucifixed nails out of the hearts with her mouth, inserting them into the other heart and riding of them again. After exhaustive exchange, the gold leaf from her face erases gradually and the street is inaugurated. Making a homage to the people of the town as well as the Deves family whose history of gum arabic production developed in this single street, the action illustrates the passage of Alice as featured in the recent print etching works. Both about releasing black and white voodoos, Alice is releasing the guilt, abandon and pain held by her mother. Two suspended hearts for two missing parental figures.
During her residencies in Senegal and Gabon, Mba Bikoro starts to play and displace the symbols of bank notes and visa entry stamps. In that period she starts a chain of correspondences to anonymous individuals by creating her own 3rd class postage stamps with the famous silhouette of the protagonist character seen in the printwork series of Alice In Wonderland. Some postage stamps hold the portraits of old residents from Senegal St Louis whose identity remain a mystery, Les Inconnues proposes a way to retrieve, activate or create the lost identities by calling out the public in the hope that these would be recognised and their stories retold. The correspondences to Gabon make a particular critique on the lack of monitoring and breach of human rights in the postage system, illustrating the growing frustrations, pressures and isolations of communities struggling between modernity and tradition. Posts are opened before they even arrive to the correspondee or never arrive. Which makes the possibility of exchange and encounter impossible, and this remains the responsibility of authoritive powers governed by over 40 years of continual dictatorship and regressive levels of development. In the attemptive retrieval of these identities, the postage stamps not only potentially give a voice to individual and collective experiences that were never written down, they also ensure a poetic legacy that these stories survive and are not forgotten. Mba Bikoro wanted to demonstrate in this work that the modern and the archaic, the traditional archive/document and the contemporary exist in a multilayered fashion, and that they can enrich one another. The disruptions, problems and losses that result from the tension between tradition and modernity are also the theme of The Uncomfortable Truth (2010) and NonIdentity (2011).
The visa stamps and banknotes are inked with a symbol, generated by 1930’s Disney animations, a handshake between Mickey and his companion Friday. Legitimising a friendship/accord based on false independence, costly freedoms, environmental destruction, ignorance and for the suffering and eradications of peoples that fall outside the margins. Transformed into an emblem belonging to children animation, it creates an inherent symbol partaking in the creation of an imagined nationalism or reality constantly performed in our quotidian discourses and to our rectifications to Marxism’s incapacity to deal with nationalism. There is potential for peace as much as there is potential for treason. The manipulation and alienation of these symbols of authority, by copying them or through an exchange of visual emblems, provocatively questions the monopoly of power, control and the security mentality of the state and should be read as a resistance against repression. In 34’ (2012) those issues are reflected from the artist’s experiences in South Africa during the 2012’s summer Johannesburg miners’ protests. A comment on the contested validity and morality of protest and the value of human rights violated from both the authorities and amongst the people fighting for their rights at the same time however neglecting the value of human life.
These political yet subtle works derive from the story of Alice in the printworks series of Alice In Wonderland. Alice remains self-determined, beyond tradition, societal norms and patriarchal repression. What values deserve to be protected?
Performance Actions by Nathalie Mba Bikoro
Community, society, mythology, heritage, authenticity and subcultures are the central themes of the works oscillating between realities and the fantasy worlds. Making mixed media conceptual works primarily through the mediums of performance and video, Bikoro is not a studio artist. Her preferred place of production are the streets collecting through photography that breaks away from reportage and live actions that become political narratives and interventions responding to the spaces she encounters. In live settings, the work can be read as an appeal for intervention or as a place to consider alternatives. In this environment she draws her materials from the surroundings of everyday life and questions the meaning of things by translating and transforming narratives and senses of everyday life by investigating notions of ‘communitas’. Exploring the questions of how we define society, what mechanisms hold us together, and what role politics, taboos and traditions play in this process. The works deal with self-negations, cultural identity, and nationalism with opposition to methods of anthropological structures whilst delivering the potential for performativity as a means of resistance.
Since 2011, Mba Bikoro alters documents such as passports, postage stamps, banknotes and visa entry stamps, with the aim of disrupting state systems of representation and identification and generating propositions about belonging and body politic. In 2012, the artist publicly burns her three passports in Berlin in a live performance titled Brushing Borders: Homage to Mandela. Whilst erasing her identity she generates a much stronger sense of identity and power through a passage of ‘baptisation’ by drinking 7 litres of red wine throughout the passages in which she has to write an oath of birth before burning each passport which states her desires for individual freedom in faith and belief outside the confines of imagined traditions of church or state laws. One expects that she refers to historical events in the rise of political conflicts and fascism, particularly denoting relations to power constructions. By burning her passports she confirms the struggle between traditions and modernity, heritage and authenticity, belonging and faith. Her legacy is one of many that keep performing throughout communities of the unsettled conflicts of race and identity, institutional constraints and migratory conflicts. She is both breaking the black and white voodoos from her childhood, inciting a kind of exorcism performed through ritual references constructed through colonial encounters. It also explicitly makes reference to accusation, persecution and displacement of peoples in the Second World War and denoting the destructiveness of apartheid in South Africa.
In Brazilia, Mba Bikoro burned Francs CFAs and Reals currency notes in front of the National Bank of Brazil during the FLAAC event in 2012 including a residency with Corpos Politico Informaticos. The action Without Sanctuary reflects on our complete dependency and value on abstract forms of power as well as questioning the lack of human rights concerns within the Brazilian authorities towards ethnic diversity and heritage. It is an action punishable by law in Latin America as well as in parts of West African countries. Following a participatory intervention from the public, the artist follows onto creating a golden flag made of African wax sewn on her arm, waves it in front of the bank quarters and runs along the length of the street. Slowing down she walks barefoot with the waving flag and her feet are slowly burned from the excrutiating heat of the city. She resumes the action after her feet and body can no longer bare the pain. At the same time, the artist was involved in local protests about the human rights of indigenous peoples of Brazil who’s territories and homes are being overtaken by new government regimes of capitalist re-developments. There was a haunting message left by Bikoro; the currency the authorities invest/burn is eventually the destruction of a peoples’ heritage and future relations/survival. Governments are ready to spend billions to displace and erase communities and histories that are becoming increasingly faded to Brazilian identity which prevents the country from future dialogues with other communities and races and the development of a creolised nation. The displacement and erasure of the indigenous peoples means that in fracturing the links between tradition and modernity, a dangerous fascist nationalism becomes embedded in the peoples’ consciousness and heritage becoming void. The flag emblem of a nation, illustrates the impossibility of creolisation and resolution. Both a symbol of mixed nations, the gift, mixed races and new-independence, the latter betrays its own mission and hope. Waved in front of the bank and marathoned across the streets critiques the impossibility of a united community, its frustrations and the irresponsibility of leading governments and institutions on their duty to serve their populations. We have betrayed our own promises for a contemporary future that has turned into a modern crisis.
In her residency in Brazil’s Perpendicular programme in Belo Horizonte, the artist was arrested in the favela of Santa Lucia. After performing The Middle Passage (2011), the actions raised controversies particularly amongst the female community, raising the alarm that an ‘African nyanga’ came to corrupt and make ill rituals against the community. Suspending three chickens above a roof covered with gold and replacing their skins with gold pigments delivered an aggressive image that deployed stereotypes based on myths about a people that the local community knew little about or were completely disconnected from.
The final resolve was to open a multi-dialogue through a participatory performance with Folds (2011). The concept was to resolve the disputes and stereotypes that both favela and the middle class communities in the rich city had between each other and Folds used a creative form to channel this dialogue, encounter and collaboration. People were invited to create paper boats, as a poetic symbol for the slave trade boats and the sea as the 1st passages for encounter between peoples of the world. At nightfall participants were invited to release the boats with a candle inside of them into the lake that separates both communities. The central meeting point to both parties, the lake became a lake of fire, floating lights that held the wishes and dreams delivered and sent into the paper boats by the community. Connecting divided communities with the same wishes and aspirations for the future, those thoughts travel the water and its lights reflecting the light of the stars in the sky above, the last map and navigation back to home. Illustrating the hope that both communities remember that they are from the same home and are responsible for each other because their aspirations remain the same.
Again these works on cultural crossings and dialogues progress form earlier performance video works such as Volcano Dig (2007) using a converging voice dialogue between an operatic female voice and an Islamist male chanter in dialogue. It is a short story about love, that includes the role of oppressive institutions upon local populations and the role of women strongly takes primary feature. We see women with faces covered in black veils performing daily house cleaning chores inside a volcano whose actions dangerously resembles the theatrical tortures of Abu Graib. In the end the voices converge and their voices become the beats of distanced echoed gunshots which are actually the slow dancing footsteps of a waltz between a man and a woman.
Through another relationship, StasiDuck Live Opera (2007-11) is an online performance project reflecting on the role between the sender and the receiver as both performers, anonymous and creating spaces of tension, trust, danger, play and seduction. It makes use of the memory and duration of panoptic law described by Foucault where the artist performs live actions through the commands or comments of invited audiences through live web interaction, where Bikoro can only be seen through a digital screen and she can only receive messages through a private studio on a large tv screen reading the reactions. Systematically nothing is performed to the literal sense, as the aim is to transform the live requests into unexpected forms of language, deconstruct narratives of the aesthetic and investigate dimensions of collaboration and action. In the end the project defies the system of power relations between a ‘master and slave’ dynamic, disorientates and fractures the logic of senses by constructing new forms of ambiguous encounter and dialogue.
Some of these elements are re-explored later in Causality 2011 when the artist’s presence is absent and only remains a blank space with a telephone, which the audience must answer when it rings. This time the artist sends instructions or texts that the participant must enact or simply reflect on. Similarly during the online performance piece Autopsy (2010) in Cape Town, participants interacted online with the artist and exchanged stories and sense-touch actions which were drawn blindfolded and sent by mail to the participants as abstract portraits of themselves. Or again, Ezekiel’s Bread/Positioning Osmotic Impulses (2012) offers baked bread made out of human faeces that is left on a table with a knife. Making reference to the prophet Ezekiel warning of society’s ills and abandon for communication.
Both the White Lily Commandments (2011) and NonIdentity (2011) investigated the erasure and re-interpretation of slavery symbols both used by the old French Empire. On the body of the artist remains two tattoos; one with the symbol of the white lily flower tattooed on African slaves by French colonialists and a slave ship 19th century engraving remastered and following the direction back to the African continent.
We Cannot Do It Without The Rose (2012) articulates the concept of social sculpture through human belief, resistance and forgiveness explained by Joseph Beuys and presents a homage to the activists of the White Rose movement such as Sophie Scholl fighting against Nazi fascism during the second World War in Germany. The artist was sent to perform in the Berlin’s Neukoln former prison cleaning the dirty hallways with white t-shirts. With two buckets, she dips the shirt in the water and swipes the floor of the cell hallway until the shirt is black with dirt. Then she dips the t-shirt in the bucket of red wine and puts the t-shirt on her body. She repeats the action for another two hours amounting to ten t-shirts that she is wearing on her body. Exiting outside, one by one she takes off the t-shirts and soaks out the remaining liquid of wine and dust into her mouth and drinks it, at times choking and vomiting the liquid. The shirts are laid on the floor in a line in the closed courtyard.
Integral to the artist’s concepts is the return to the body, the one that speaks first with all its senses. During her ten-year battle with leukaemia cancer in early childhood, the artist underwent long-term therapies that included creative outputs which became permanent forms of language and processes with her thinking, communication and interaction with others.
Today this healing process is translated through the use of voice and body in the performative encounters of every day life. From earlier works such as St Bartholomea (2009) the artist is witnessed licking the floors in the fashion of a cross and eating chorizo sausage spitting them out on the ground and re-chewing them consecutively for long periods of hours as seen in EatWordEat (2006) during a residency in Spain’s Galician region of Pontevedra. Key features from Pontevedra works includes a performance focusing on survival in forests where the artist lived in isolation and used the excrements of her own body to make portraits thrown onto canvas and creating webs of black cotton threads within parts of the forests. In Last Independence series Mbolo (2010) the artist is featured with white cooking flour exiting out of her mouth creating cloud dusts in the air or breath drawings on the ground (Holy Mess & Dirty Sermons | 2010) whilst she speaks Fang to the audience and follows toward a ritual of memorial celebration that includes burning her grandmother’s dress. These are later pronounced with gold dust flying through her breaths as well as eating and spitting white lily flowers (The Uncomfortable Truth | 2010), writing and licking black-charcoaled calendar dates to fill white walls into black holes (Female Genital Mutilation | 2008), spitting golden leaf apples from buckets of water (The White Lilly Commandments | 2011), eating black and red cotton threads and vomiting the contents form her mouth (Trinity & Open The Gate | 2011), drinking a row of seven litres of red wine in between writing oaths and burning her passports ((B)rushing (B)orders | 2012), and taking mouth-falls of large iron nails out of suspended goats’ hearts (Middle Passage & Passage Deves | 2011-12). Unquestionably these actions can be reflected as ‘exorcisms’ and exercising her memory out of particular traumas.
In St Louis, Senegal, Bikoro inaugurates a new street by the name of Passage Deves (2012). The event was marked by a performance where the artist marathons in the same street between two suspended goats’ hearts in which her task is to remove crucifixed nails out of the hearts with her mouth, inserting them into the other heart and riding of them again. After exhaustive exchange, the gold leaf from her face erases gradually and the street is inaugurated. Making a homage to the people of the town as well as the Deves family whose history of gum arabic production developed in this single street, the action illustrates the passage of Alice as featured in the recent print etching works. Both about releasing black and white voodoos, Alice is releasing the guilt, abandon and pain held by her mother. Two suspended hearts for two missing parental figures.
During her residencies in Senegal and Gabon, Mba Bikoro starts to play and displace the symbols of bank notes and visa entry stamps. In that period she starts a chain of correspondences to anonymous individuals by creating her own 3rd class postage stamps with the famous silhouette of the protagonist character seen in the printwork series of Alice In Wonderland. Some postage stamps hold the portraits of old residents from Senegal St Louis whose identity remain a mystery, Les Inconnues proposes a way to retrieve, activate or create the lost identities by calling out the public in the hope that these would be recognised and their stories retold. The correspondences to Gabon make a particular critique on the lack of monitoring and breach of human rights in the postage system, illustrating the growing frustrations, pressures and isolations of communities struggling between modernity and tradition. Posts are opened before they even arrive to the correspondee or never arrive. Which makes the possibility of exchange and encounter impossible, and this remains the responsibility of authoritive powers governed by over 40 years of continual dictatorship and regressive levels of development. In the attemptive retrieval of these identities, the postage stamps not only potentially give a voice to individual and collective experiences that were never written down, they also ensure a poetic legacy that these stories survive and are not forgotten. Mba Bikoro wanted to demonstrate in this work that the modern and the archaic, the traditional archive/document and the contemporary exist in a multilayered fashion, and that they can enrich one another. The disruptions, problems and losses that result from the tension between tradition and modernity are also the theme of The Uncomfortable Truth (2010) and NonIdentity (2011).
The visa stamps and banknotes are inked with a symbol, generated by 1930’s Disney animations, a handshake between Mickey and his companion Friday. Legitimising a friendship/accord based on false independence, costly freedoms, environmental destruction, ignorance and for the suffering and eradications of peoples that fall outside the margins. Transformed into an emblem belonging to children animation, it creates an inherent symbol partaking in the creation of an imagined nationalism or reality constantly performed in our quotidian discourses and to our rectifications to Marxism’s incapacity to deal with nationalism. There is potential for peace as much as there is potential for treason. The manipulation and alienation of these symbols of authority, by copying them or through an exchange of visual emblems, provocatively questions the monopoly of power, control and the security mentality of the state and should be read as a resistance against repression. In 34’ (2012) those issues are reflected from the artist’s experiences in South Africa during the 2012’s summer Johannesburg miners’ protests. A comment on the contested validity and morality of protest and the value of human rights violated from both the authorities and amongst the people fighting for their rights at the same time however neglecting the value of human life.
These political yet subtle works derive from the story of Alice in the printworks series of Alice In Wonderland. Alice remains self-determined, beyond tradition, societal norms and patriarchal repression. What values deserve to be protected?