However, several smaller projects operating within Cape’s decentralised network of venues and routes but not dependent on the organisation, showed some success. One such project was The Chimurenga Library, realised by editor of Ntone Ejabe, writer Stacey Hardy and other members of the Chimurenga Magazine team, in collaboration with artist Douglas Gimberg.
While partly funded by Cape, the project was the manifestation of an independent long-term project to create an online resource for research into African literature. Books from Chimurenga’s own library were added to the Cape Town Central Library, now housed in the newly renovated Drill Hall, and routes and links created between them with red tape, according to several themes like post-colonialism, sex and psychoanalysis. A series of discussions and performances took place every week, along with video displays and installations: Aryan Kaganof’s wall writing and Tau Tavengwa’s excerpts of sex scenes from African novels were displayed in the reading rooms. The project activated an existing public space for a specific audience, beginning to make witty and useful links based on actual content.
Another such project was Anthea Buys’ Fynbos Museum of Khayelitsha, a conceptually tight and well-executed independent project at Lookout Hill, comprising installations of strange concrete and ring-fence structures with varieties of fynbos waiting to be planted. The notion of a museum keeping record of indigenous plants made present the complexities of this context.
Out of Cape’s reduced young curator’s program came three projects. Loyiso Qanya’s Umahluko, (an Nguni word meaning ‘difference’), felt like a beginning rather than a fully realised project, which it had all the potential to be. On the opening day, not all the work was up, and the work that was up wasn't properly labelled; the attempt to show Khanyi Mbongwa and James Taylor's video in a tunnel constructed out of black cloth rendered the work virtuallt invisible, as light permeated the fabric.
Qanya was put in a further difficult position as the centrepiece of his show, a library installation by Thomas Mulcaire, was withdrawn, along with much of his budget. There were however some interesting and unconventional propositions: Jane Alexander’s book, Uhlenga-Hlengiso E-Khayelitsha: Umahluko (Survey Khayelitsha: Difference 2009) invited the audience to write something in response to Alexander’s photomontages of non-sites in the desolate landscape of the Cape Flats, while Nomusa Mukhuba’s collages of Nollywood film stills were witty and clever.
Young curator Nkuli Mlangeni’s So who is Brenda Fassie? at Langa Highschool was the other project with enormous potential that ultimately remained a kind of proposal. The installations in classrooms felt somehow sparse, and incomplete, like an unfinished collage. James Webb’s video piece was not in synch, and an interactive stage-and-disco-ball installation read as somewhat amateur. The loosely choreographed performances by school learners were very charming, with one striking piece featuring performers in Barack Obama masks. Yet overall, the performances in Langa felt dispersed; with no posters leading up to the school ground inviting the local community, the small audience was mostly from outside the township. The afternoon also seemed staggered and under-staged.
These kinds of gaps in curation and structuring of the event are where Cape’s lack of self-criticality becomes apparent, and with the lulls in the afternoon I began to wonder about the gaps in the organiser’s guidance and actual engagement with the projects of the young curators. Lack of funding and the de-centering of its two main ‘exhibitions/events’ outside of gallery spaces are insufficient excuse for a lack of attention to the details of the display and staging of an event. To ignore such glaring oversights would be patronising to the audiences in these contexts, and to the developing curators themselves.
The most successful of the young curator’s projects was Lerato Bereng’s Thank You Driver. Bereng located her project on taxis moving between township and city, thereby engaging the public in a more complex way. Some of the components included a video work shot on a taxi in Maputo by Mozambican artist, Gemuce, an interactive performance by Angolan artist and poet Nástio Mosquito, a taxi navigator complete with her own till, by the Gugulective, and the 32 member New Teenager’s Gospel Choir from Khayelitsha, in collaboration with French artist Isa Suarez. Each taxi ride was a unique, frequently bizarre experience directly intersecting with the everyday routes of certain, but not all of the public. Unpredictable partnering of taxi drivers meant that arrival and departure times shifted, making the work difficult to find, and work went missing from one of the taxis. This project’s success, however, lay in its original and contemporary notion of public space as something transitional, incidental with people’s daily routes to and from work and with the real, fast and hard trade of the taxi industry.
Other works that achieved this were the performative works with starting points at Cape Town station and Golden Acre mall. The Phakama Performance group’s MOVE took the audience on an actual and allegorical journey from Cape Town station via train, taxi and bus. Meshac Gaba’s Amabulant saw 10 people carry display cases containing different National flags in a circuitous loop around Cape Town station. Nicola Grobler’s Small Victories and Art Pays’ performance at the Golden Acre (followed by an unusually frank discussion forum on democracy and gentrification at District 6 Museum) attracted engagement by placing themselves in the path of curious shoppers and commuters. For me it was in these journeys by taxi, by train and or by car, lost in the Cape Flats, that Cape’s decentred approach had the most value. They made me realise how little I know of the city in which I live.
Ultimately, Cape should aim to realise the potential of moving away from the structure of a Biennale (which it is not and never has been), and towards a platform for self-funded and self-organised projects. It is then that it would begin to form the sentence ‘Art for All’ as a question, understanding that all art can ever do is reform its understanding of that question.
Bettina Malcomess is a Cape Town-based artist, curator and writer.
