Art on their own terms: women kick back at the status quo

Black women are 'gatvol', a message driven home at the Live Art Festival organised by the Institute for Creative Arts in Cape Town this month.

The female subject, Sethembile Msezane, in the work Excerpts From the Past appeared trapped between the colonial and African traditional mores she replayed through gesture and language.

iQhiya, the all-female collective which includes Asemahle Ntlonti, Bronwyn Katz, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Bonolo Kavula, Charity Kelapile, Lungiswa Gqunta, Pinky Mayeng, Msezane, Sisipho Ngodwana, Thandiwe Msebenzi, and Thuli Gamedze, turned down an invitation to perform at the festival. They chose to exploit the platform to host a conversation mediated by Same Mdluli about why they aren't a performance-driven group.

This non-performance lifted the silence around how black women in the art world are either overtly visible through performances or are completely overlooked. In forming a collective they've gained the attention of the establishment and make art on their own terms.

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Invisibility underpinned Donna Kukama's provocative performance Chapter Y: Is Survival Not Archival? She delivered a darkly amusing walkabout of the contentious Our Lady exhibition at the Iziko SA National Art Gallery.

Silence was evoked literally as she conducted the tour in darkness with only a head torch attached to her head shedding light on the art works.

Amid an outcry by the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce, which disapproved of the inclusion of an artwork by Zwelethu Mthethwa (accused of murdering sex worker Nokuphila Kumalo), artists had removed their works from the display last year. Kukama exploited the blank spaces left on the wall, filling them with either written statements rejecting the "lady" epithet or projections of the names of women who have escaped attention.

She wrote their names in sand and lit them with an overhead projector, drawing attention to the invisibility of the black female victims whose names rarely are remembered or mourned by society.

Gabrielle Goliath's Elegy - Noluvo Swelindawo was a remembrance of the lesbian woman who met a grisly death in Khayelitsha last year, and of other targets of violence because of their sexual orientation.

Kukama opened her performance by reading the names of black female artists who'd been excluded from the Our Lady exhibition, echoing the sentiment expressed by the iQhiya collective - that this demographic has mostly been overlooked by the predominantly white art establishment.    

• This article was originally published in The Times