Live Art Series: The Earth Still Shakes

1:30PM They Look at Me and That’s All They Think by Nelisiwe Xaba

2:00PM acontinua by nora chipaumire

3:30PM Plasticization by Nelisiwe Xaba

4:00PM Event Concludes

They Look at Me and That’s All They Think

Sarah Baartman, who became known as "Hottentot Venus," was an African woman brought from the Cape to London in 1810 by a British naval doctor and exhibited in England and France as a scientific curiosity. When she died several years later in Paris, the zoologist Cuvier made plaster casts of her body. Various body parts were preserved in formalin. In 2002, at the request of the South African president Nelson Mandela, her remains were transported back to South Africa and ceremoniously buried. Sarah Baartman’s story is symbolic of the oppression of African women under the colonial regime and of the West’s voyeuristic view of African countries. South African choreographer, dancer, and performer Nelisiwe Xaba sees the story as an allegory of her own artistic quest, which took her out of Soweto and into the contemporary art world. Xaba exposes the clichés of exotic voyeurism.

acontinua

When Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo invited Zimbabwean choreographer and performer nora chipaumire to present a retrospective of past works, she refused to participate in a linear and institutionalized format of presentation. acontinua --an obituary, a manual for a life lived chasing life, was made out of this refusal, as a commitment to being alive and the knowledge that all our experiences become muscle, breath, footfall, backbend. The word "acontinua" celebrates André Lepecki’s ongoing work with liberatory choreographies and marks the artist’s personal dedication to the Mozambican leader Eduardo Mondale, the Zapatistas, and all the unsung women without whom change is impossible. Now, chipaumire resituates this generative refusal at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art over a single distinctive performance. For this deeply personal work, chipaumire is joined by artist and performer Shamar Watt and musician David Gagliardi, with sound engineering by Kwamina Biney and music augmentation by Thomas Mapfumo (Chimurenga).

Plasticization

This work sees Nelisiwe Xaba inside a plastic bag used by many migrant travellers. Xaba works through a variety of travelling shoes to foreground the various roles that women are called to play--from labor, to standards of beauty, to fragility. It ends as a comment on the hypocisy of representation and the continued identities forced onto African women.

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Host or Publisher National Museum of African Art