There is no respect for the black avant-garde in this country,” Athi Patra Ruga rages in his icy-cold, yet bustling, studio in Fordsburg’s Artists Studios, commonly known as The Bag Factory.
“I have faced a lot of disrespect from people in this industry who feel they cannot break out of the curio mould they’ve been put into — black people who accept the view that Africa has nothing to do with postmodernism. Africa is to be used only as an ‘influence’. But Africa is the avant-garde.”
The reason for Ruga’s rightful rant is his upcoming show at Cape Town’s Michael Stevenson gallery. He is anxious about the show. And justifiably so. It is hard enough to break into South Africa’s insular art world, but to come from the world of fashion — bastion of all things frivolous and transient — hoping to make an impression in the hallowed, “serious” alternative universe that is “aaht, dahling” is really asking for it.
At the Michael Stevenson gallery, his work is being displayed next to that of Nigeria’s iconic queer photographer, the late Rotimi Fani-Kayodé. A little further on, Egyptian photographer Youssef Nabil is exhibiting Sleep in My Arms, an exquisite collection of staged “fantasy” scenes captured in striking, intimate, hand-coloured photographs, tinged with homoerotic voyeurism.
Ruga’s work, titled She’s dancing for the rain with her hand in the toaster, is what he calls “subversion through tailoring”. Using jackets, found or designed by him, drenched in rapeseed oil and suspended from hooks, Ruga interrogates the historical and gender-specific role tailoring has played in dictating to us our space in society and how we negotiate that space.
Ruga, who runs the clothing label Just Nje/Amper Couture, has included in his exhibit the third instalment of his Die Naai Masjien trilogy, titled Miss Congo, and filmed during a recent residency in Kinshasa. Miss Congo, a multi-channel video installation, sees this multi-disciplinarian morphing into six different characters. One screen shows Ruga upside-down on a heap of trash in Kinshasa, draped in a gold lamé jumpsuit, feverishly busy finishing the Miss Congo tapestry. Vestal virgins, sewer canals and inflatable Boeing 747s between his legs also make an appearance.
Also on show in this exhibition without a name is the work of Zanele Muholi. One would be hard-pressed to find an artist more different to Ruga — both in terms of personality and the works they produce. Whereas Ruga sees the world, literally, as his playground, Muholi approaches her work in a more studied, ponderous way.
Winner of the 2005 Tollman Award for Visual Arts, Muholi is a tireless campaigner for the rights of women, placing special emphasis on fighting abuses such as rape — suffered by many township lesbians.
While Ruga chooses not to wear his political heart on his French-seamed, amper-couture sleeve, Muholi has stapled hers to her camouflage jacket sleeve, letting its blood drip all over the freshly polished floors of enslaving institutions, such as patriarchy, neocolonialism and homophobia.
But with Being, the body of work on display, Muholi has turned the shock down a notch or two. Her portraits of lesbian couples lead one to speculate whether she has buckled under the pressure of all the controversy generated by Only Half the Picture, an earlier work.
“I am always interrogating issues surrounding black lesbian women. It is about the need for lesbian visi-bility — and resistance to all the pathologies we were force-fed.”
Whether, as Ruga wondered, the black avant-garde will respond to the challenges posed by the artists, remains to be seen.
These free thinkers, necessary additions to the local art landscape, are unmaking the world as we know it.
The exhibition, at the Michael Stevenson gallery, Cape Town, runs from June 4 to July 7. See www.michaelstevenson.com