“I don’t separate art, education and life.” Ayesha Price (Valley 2019)

Ayesha Price (1975-2024), who died recently from an undiagnosed heart condition, was a committed and impactful exponent of socially engaged art. Through the evolution of her practice, Ayesha came to embody a praxis in which life, art, education and activism forged a seamless whole. Her achievements were truly remarkable, and yet few in the gallery-centric artworld are cognizant of Ayesha’s significance as an artist. This should surprise no one, with most of her work off the mainstream map of elite and privileged sites and more so given her tendency to position her practice within communities affected by the traumatic experience and legacy of forced removals. Reflecting on her all too short career one reaches the indubitable conclusion that she deserves wide recognition for her profound contributions — and challenges — to art and society.

Many, especially in the Western Cape, will think of Ayesha first and foremost as an educator. She studied to be an art teacher at Hewat College, a teacher-training centre in Athlone. She taught within the formal education system – at the Battswood Art Centre in Grassy Park and, for ten years, at the Children’s Art Centre on the periphery of District Six. Ayesha also served for five years as principal of the latter institution.  She made further contributions as an educator through her work in the museum sector — for Iziko Museums, the Irma Stern Museum and, especially, the District Six Museum, where she gained invaluable experience in community-based educational and curatorial methodologies. Her free-lance work included training art teachers for the Western Cape Education Department, as well as facilitating workshops for the City of Cape Town, the Robben Island Museum and the non-profit Institute for Healing Memories.  More recently, Ayesha worked in the higher education sector, as a part-time lecturer (in sculpture) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Her broad-based experience as an educator meant that she had an immeasurable impact on art education in the Western Cape over 27 years.

As an artist, Ayesha was from an early age drawn to art’s potential to impact on society. As she put it in her Master’s dissertation, “the physical rewards of art production are linked to, but secondary, to the social benefits when art is used as a tool for learning and living, not merely as a commodity to be bought and sold.” (Price 2024) This awareness of art’s radical potential can be traced back to her teenage years, when she contributed visual media to political campaigns. She recalled that “The feverish hours spent composing and producing anonymous works in secret rooms within a covert team, handing them over and seeing them activated in the thronging masses supporting and amplifying the impact of the event; provided me with an intense sense of purpose and meaning that eluded me when I practised oil painting in my dad’s garage while the world outside was burning” (Price 2024).

Ayesha’s early art works reveal an acute sense of socialisation and agency, with a strong feminist impulse. One is further struck by the diversity of media, a hallmark of her practice.  Manufactured Lifestyles (2004) is a series of digital prints inspired by women’s magazines. The series foregrounds the role of media in constructing femininity as a binary to masculinity – a process she further challenged through collaborating on this project with two male artists — Donovan Ward and Paul Hendricks. Panty Project (2009) comprised oversized sculptural renditions of female underwear that, other than their bloated scale, resemble casts. Panty Project speaks to how gender roles are constructed through ‘normal’ conventions such as women’s clothing. 

It was as a fine arts student at the University of South Africa — while still employed full-time — that Ayesha produced Save the Princess (2013), an immersive installation comprising eight video panels, with a soundtrack from Garth Erasmus. This work — for which she received an award for top 4th year student — referenced local wetlands (Princess Vlei), not far from the suburb where she grew up, Parkwood (where her family had been relocated from Greenpoint and District Six). More specifically, Save the Princess grew out of Ayesha’s participation in the Princess Vlei Forum, a community-based initiative mobilised to resist the City of Cape Town’s plans to sell the local wetlands to developers. Princess Vlei is a fragile ecosystem that carries historical, mythical, cultural and recreational value, particularly for indigenous, dispossessed and displaced communities on the Cape Flats. The installation, which was originally intended to be presented in the wetlands — an intention thwarted by resources — was presented at the Lovell Gallery in Woodstock. Notwithstanding the genesis of the installation as an act of resistance, Ayesha’s treatment of the theme is more imaginative than didactic. Dense, monochromatic palimpsests of human and other natural forms swirl in incessant motion, evoking a sublime, intangible and ethereal presence. 

Ayesha produced a second video-installation, Remember to forget. Forget to remember (2016) as part of a revisionist intervention into the Delville Wood Museum in France, which was funded by the Department of Arts and Culture. Ayesha’s single channel video installation counters an existing frieze, which is positioned opposite. She explained her intention as being to “re-contextualise monolithic, despotic edifices through the digital medium of mutable light and time…  scal[ing] up the contributions of those downplayed or completely excluded from the narrative of the commemorative bronze … [with] strong emphasis … upon entire communities … affected by this war that drained them of men and ravaged their land.” (Pissarra 2017). 

Remember to forget and Save the Princess are both original and compelling works that respond to specific locations and to questions of their representation. But one senses that Ayesha’s gravitational pull was increasingly towards community-based public art rather than to official monuments. Indeed, alongside her work on Save the Princess, Ayesha facilitated community workshops for the Princess Vlei Forum, leading to what she described as “public puppet parades and installations” which ran as an annual event for at least five years (ASAI n.d.).  Through building on formative experiences of collaboration, including her earlier participation in the youth collective Art Junction, Ayesha developed a methodology that drew in equal measure on her skills as an educator and her commitment to community-based activism. In practice, this meant that she not only collaborated frequently with fellow artists but also became exceptionally proficient in facilitating meaningful participation from local residents. Notable examples of this approach include site-specific work for the Du Noon Library and Pelican Park Day Care Centre, commissioned by the Western Cape Government. The provincial government also commissioned the District Six Museum for the Peninsula Maternity Hospital Memory Project, with Ayesha playing a key role. For this project, which took almost two years, participants included “a crew of about 30 ex-residents and Peninsula staff members aged from four to ninety-two!” (Valley 2019).  In all these community-based projects, we see the dissolution of distinction between Ayesha’s roles as artist and educator, and between her roles as author and collaborator. 

Ayesha’s last major work, We have lost one another (2024), was a further milestone in her application of community based methodologies.  As with Save the Princess, the production of this work was facilitated by her registration as a student, this time for a Masters degree in Fine Arts at UCT (for which she was awarded a distinction). At one level, the work may be perceived to have been a temporary event — an expansive, collaboratively produced site-specific installation (comprising a cluster of quasi autonomous, inter-related installations) that was located on the contested grounds of District Six. However, to gain a fuller appreciation of the installation one needs to recognize that it was not a ‘finished work’ in the traditional sense of the locus of art being situated in objects.  Rather the work was an experiential and empowering process, a holistic, durational, collaborative journey partaken with a cross-generational blend of former and current residents of District Six. Central to the work’s methodology was a series of workshops in which, through the medium of art, she facilitated deep introspection on the past, present and future of District Six. Key too, was the role of ceramics in these workshops, where commercial clay was brought into conversation with clay harvested from District Six, a potent means to facilitate reflections on land and home.

The processes that went into producing We have lost another, detailed in Ayesha’s dissertation, reveal how radical her approach had become. Radical in the sense of an artist forfeiting conventional notions of authorship in favour of co-authorship with communities; and radical in her displacement of the artwork/object as the locus of art. While these ideas are established within traditions of radical art practice, what amplified the integrity and authenticity of her work was her grounded situatedness within her community of collaborators (Ayesha herself had moved to the periphery of Woodstock, historically part of District Six, in her adulthood).  Reflecting on how deeply her identity was shaped by her experience of District Six, Ayesha noted “the seemingly inescapable confluence of art and my life in District Six over the past twenty-five years: as a teacher at the local public art school, as a volunteer, art facilitator and curator with the District Six Museum, as a new resident and local artist with maternal links to the neighbourhood before forced removals” (Price 2024). The land which hosted We have lost one another is a scarred terrain that she circled or crossed thousands of times, it was a constant reminder of an unresolved trauma, making her engagement with the site much more deeply felt than that of many artists who produce land art.  

Ayesha’s final work was radical too, in its challenge to anthropocentrism. She expressed her “support for a world not dominated by human privilege or anthropocentrism at the expense of all the other things on this planet or this universe which are agentic, mostly, beyond our comprehension” (Price 2024). With We have lost one another she sought to reclaim not only unity among a historically dispersed community but also between humans and land. The vexed questions of return and reparations required a form of restoration beyond material compensation. “Reclaiming the land”, she asserted, “means working with it empathetically and collaboratively, to relate to it as more than just a transferable commodity” (Price 2024). This approach required a major paradigm shift, to position “people and land as equal actants in the struggle for social cohesion and social justice” (Price 2024).

Supporting her view, from an academic perspective, Ayesha drew on New Materialism (Bennett 2010) and Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman 2018), philosophies that grant agency to the non-human world. It thus becomes evident that the relative absence of figuration in We have lost another — with the human form supplanted by a wide array of materials (including scaffolding, building soil, digitally printed interviews, iron rods capped by glass jars filled with found objects and soil from the Cape Flats, washing lines, pillow cases, ceramics, trestle tables…) was more than a formalist rebuttal of traditional conventions of memorialization. Rather, the privileging of a multitude of ‘things’ gave credence to her declared position of “following theories that privilege the connection between land, people, objects, and relations” (Price 2024).

What becomes clear in reflecting on Ayesha’s growth as an artist is that not only was she increasingly embracing a situated, collaborative approach to art practice, where the very idea of collaboration extended to the non-human, but that she was aware that she was crafting a new methodology for socially engaged art. Her dissertation concludes with the observation that: “It serves to develop an approach or methodology for collaborative art projects that serve a social justice agenda within the sphere of socially engaged art and the philosophical thinking of new materialism and object orientated ontology as a basis for deeper research and a further honed collaborative art practice in the future.” That’s a long sentence, it needs to be read slowly. In brief, Ayesha inspires and challenges us: to think about our approach to art, to education, to community, to social justice, and to rethink our relations with the earth and the non-human. That’s a lot to think about and act on.

 

“I am grateful to Donovan Ward, Chrischené Julius and Stephané Huigen-Conradie for comments on an earlier draft.”

 

References

1. Africa South Art Initiative (n.d.). “Ayesha Price”, https://asai.co.za/artist/ayesha-price/
   Bennett, Jane (2010). “A vitalist stopover on the way to a new materialism”, in Diana Coole & Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press. pp. 47—69.
2. Harman, Graham (2018). Object-oriented Ontology: A new theory of everything. London: Penguin Random House.
3. Pissarra, Mario (2017). Beyond Binaries. Durban: KZNSA Gallery. pp. 44-45. 
4. Price, Ayesha (2024). We have lost one another. UCT: Masters dissertation.
5. Valley, Greer (2019). “An Engaged Practice: a conversation with Ayesha Price”. Africa South Art Initiative, https://asai.co.za/an-engaged-practice-ayesha-price/