‘Performing Wo/Man’
Group Show at UJ ARTS CENTREAn exhibition focusing on gender identity in post-apartheid South African art, entitled ‘Performing Wo/Man’ is curated by Derek Zietsman, Master’s graduate from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Design and Architecture at UJ and Chancellor’s medal recipient for 2013.
The primary aim of the show is to explore how a changing post-apartheid socio-political environment is causing South African men and women to create new conceptions of identity, and to comment on how South Africans are breaking down previously imposed and preconceived identities.
‘Identity theorists, such as Stuart Hall and Butler, contend that identities are not something which already exists, but a construct that undergoes constant transformation, a fluid variable which shifts and changes in different contexts and at different times’, says Zietsman.
The exhibition therefore visually investigates, explores and comments on issues such as, inter alia, the historic and contemporary construction of South African identities; masculinity; femininity; patriarchal hegemony; sexual identity; social identity; racial identity; social expectations for post-apartheid gender performativity; political and social change and its effects on gender performativity; rape and violence in South Africa; abuses of power by role models and politicians.
It further references a parodic/ironic reworking of historic and contemporary gender performative imagery, it reflects on the various artists’ approaches to representing emerging cultural models of masculinity and femininity in post-apartheid South Africa, and perhaps exposes a fragility in post-apartheid gender performativity.
The artists participating in Performing Wo/Man are Bambo Sibiya, Bevan de Wet, Christiaan Diedericks, Collin Cole, Daandrey Steyn, Derek Zietsman, Diane Victor, Gordon Froud, Karin Preller, Grace da Costa, Jaco van Schalkwyk, Lehohonolo Mashaba, Paul Molete, Richardt Strydom.
06 August - 10 September
