Think from Black: a Lexicon
Public programme @ JAG (Occupation)
Saturday 28th Jan ‘23 / 10:00-14:00
Join us in-person at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) on Saturday the 28th January (10:00-14:00) for Think from Black: a Lexicon - a programme of art activations and poetry readings, featuring Nelisiwe Xaba, Christina Sharpe, Danai Mupotsa, Canisia Lubrin and Gabrielle Goliath (click here for artist bios).
This curated offering of sonic, performative and poetic responses is presented by the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), University of Johannesburg, and the Practicing Refusal Collective (PRC), in collaboration with JAG and Occupation (@occupation.jag), and with the generous support of the Princeton Collaboratorium and the Columbia University Institute for Research on Women and Gender Studies. This unique event forms part of the Johannesburg convening of Think from Black: a Lexicon - click here for more details.
‘Think from Black: A Lexicon’ is imagined as a collective effort to create a more expansive conceptual vocabulary that takes Black life - in all of its diversity and multiplicity - as its point of departure.
- - -
Programme:
Poetry readings by Danai Mupotsa & Canisia Lubrin (JAG Courtyard)
Performance: Nelisiwe Xaba, Fremde Tänze, 30mins (JAG / Occupation “Ghost Room”)
Screening: Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy - Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi, 1hr (JAG / Occupation “Blaxis Screen”)
In closing: a Reading by Christina Sharpe
- - -
Nelisiwe Xaba, Fremde Tänze
In the spring of 2014, Nelisiwe Xaba, was invited to the Julius-Hans-Spiegel-Zentrum at the Freiburg Theater, amidst the Black Forest in Southern Germany. During her residency, Nelisiwe Xaba created a dance evening based on the programs of female dancers such as Mary Wigman and Sent M’Ahesa. These pioneers of Modern Dance in the 1910s and 1920s often presented a series of short pieces accompanied by music. In one evening, they journeyed between distant places and times, or rather their imagination of them: a “Temple Dance” was followed by an “Indian Dance”, an “Arabesque” or a “Siamese Dance”. In her evening of ‘foreign dances’, Xaba rotates the perspective and exoticizes the Black Forest.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelisiwe_Xaba
Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy - Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi
Elegy is a long-term commemorative performance initiated by Gabrielle Goliath in 2015. Staged in various locations, each performance calls together a group of female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over the course of an hour.
Responding to the physical, ontological and structural outworking(s) of rape-culture in South Africa, Elegy performances invoke the absent presence of individuals whose subjectivities have been fundamentally violated, and who are as such all too easily consigned to a generic, all-encompassing victimhood. Each performance commemorates a named, loved and missed woman or LGBTIQ+ individual subjected to fatal acts of gendered and sexualised violence. Significant to the work is how loss becomes a site for community, and for empathic encounters with and across difference. Refusing the symbolic violence through which traumatised black, brown, femme and queer bodies are routinely objectified, Elegy performances open an alternative, relational space, wherein mourning is presented as a social and politically productive work, not in the sense of healing or closure but as a necessary and sustained irresolution.
For this programme, a 1hr performance screening will be held in commemoration of Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi.