Athi-Patra Ruga

Athi-Patra Ruga (born in 1984) is a South African artist who uses performance, photography, video, textiles, and printmaking to explore notions of utopia and dystopia, material and memory. His work explores the body in relation to sensuality, culture, and ideology, often creating cultural hybrids. Themes such as sexuality, Xhosa culture, and the place of queerness within post-apartheid South Africa also permeate his work. Quotes I’m here to bare witness to the times we live in. I’m here to write the greatest story ever told. That’s what wakes me up in the morning. Identity is a mind fuck. You’re not white enough, you’re not black enough, you’re not gay enough. So when I wear the balloons, it brings me to tears because not only is it physically painful but I’m weighed down by identify. As the balloons pop, I’m deflating all of these constructed ideas and revealing the true person. We had our lessons beaten into us with a stick, which has influenced how I now want to disrupt, to unlearn how things are taught. During these years of trauma I’d make up stories in my head as an escape. It was constantly crossing that border post as a young boy that made me realised I could perform, that I could change my behaviour and become someone else. From when I started in the mid two thousands, my work had always been this sort of like synthesism. Has always been about being able to switch and change. And that’s very much influenced by queer radicalism, you know, to not be clocked. And all of that. And now I’m in this strong protean place where nationalism has moved to me, exploring my inner world within a globalised world that has all these contradictions. In an interview From the beginning of my work, creating avatars and also moving on to creating worlds and Azania, I knew that I was going to make it a utopia because I know that utopias need borders, right? They need checkpoints. They need passports, visas, ways of accessing, and that becomes an epistemic thing as well. They need to create an image that the grass is green here; however they do it, whether it’s the truth or not, in imagery, et cetera. The one who is outside of the utopian place has to be established by saying that they’re lesser than because they didn’t manage to come into the space. And that usually is the queer, the black, the femme, which is basically what my work is about in relationship to exposing what utopia is. It’s also about creating embodied characters that can carry that through performance, video, tapestry, painting and drawing. In an interview The name of the show is ‘Lord, I gotta keep on (movin’)’. It’s from Bob Marley’s 1992 album, Songs of Freedom! It speaks to the protean nature, right? Which is that of keeping on moving, you know, from one medium, getting a hold of it, moving onto another, one concept and another. Also, having a medium call me. I feel that that is something that has always happened. Since the beginning of my career, there has been something political about how I used different mediums. If we start with performance, that was so that I could reach people quickly. Because that becomes an immediate bounce back, which then feeds into the studio work, and then you go again and you try it out with the people before they even become an art audience. That’s how I started. And then documentation of performance becomes a necessity. And that also then is how I enter the white cube space, showing the documentation of the performances through photography. In an interview I grew up being looked at a lot. I love performance, and being perceived is everything to me. I see the body as a site. Sight, as in vision, but also site as in landscape. For a kind of contemplation where you can layer things on your body as a performer to be reflected on. Not just in the singular. The person, but also the body nation. The body as an entrance to a landscape. And the many myths around the body. All of these ideas are important to me. I used to be a frustrated writer. So you’re right. I think of everything as an ellipsis; everything leads you somewhere, and you find your way. Language becomes a line that allows you to follow your work. Sometimes the titles are in conversation with art history, sometimes they can be verbose. It’s also a lot about creating tension and contradictions. I love the idea of bathing in paradox. I think that’s how I’m surviving in this world. I’m very aware of paradox. I started performing Beiruth in 2007. There I was, still living in downtown Johannesburg, August House, and that’s where she was born. So I would take her out and perform her. And this was in response to gender based violent attacks that happened that winter. As well as the xenophobic attacks that happened. We were quite affected by them. Beiruth was this hyper-feminine character, but also an out-of-this-world character. I was trying to confront xenophobia and GBV at the same time. That work was also engaged in nudity and the erotic as a form of protest. That in itself is an idea that is historical. I think with [the character] uNomalizo Khwezi and The Lunar Songbook [a collection of works informed by, among other things, Southern African astronomy], I have got this obsession or this wonderment that — I don’t know, may be a humanist thing in me — but I’m interested in creating a work that is an encyclopaedia and not just for entertainment. It needs to contain so much institutional knowledge. It needs to contain a lot of things to bite on for this lifetime and for a longer stretch of time. The clash between the archival Azania and the futuristic visual world that I am creating — that clash is where the magic of the exhibition is. The nature of my studio is that of collaboration and skills transfer. That’s at the core of why I wake up every day to be an artist. With tapestry, you need to collaborate; with video art, with film, with performance and stage works, you are not an island. With stained glass, I have taken on a mentor, Colleen Peacock, who has been teaching me for the last couple of years. I paint on the glass, I cut it, I choose the textures, which are quite leftfield — there are various densities that actually go against the physics of traditional stained-glass making. We both work on the tapestry, but the designs are from me — I choose everything. Self-portraiture is a tool in which I put myself on the chopping block instead of the gaze that is sometimes expected. You’ll see a lot of images of me severing my head, as well. Castrato as [the] Revolution is a self-portrait harking back to a castration by various systems: a homophobic system, an anti-black system, anything. Another form of castration is erasure, depicted here by a scratching out of the face, a silhouetting of the penis; also harking back to the castrato and the history of drag. I do like dropping things in there that will help people find out more about other gay history, art history or performance history. The Beautyful Ones are the ones that belong to an illusive future. They can sometimes be a tool for a revolution’s aspirations. They can inspire the ware. They are the same as a national, founding myth. They can sometimes be a tool for a revolution’s aspirations. They can in turn inspire the wary. They are the same as a national, founding myth somehow. I have come to terms with the fact that ‘African’ is an experience, and without any argument the experience has been riddled with prejudice, subjugation and in turn the legacy is and will take a long time to shatter those lazy international thought processes and dare I say prejudices. “Europeans” on the other hand has never had to fight for their place, both aesthetically and the influence of its critical library. All art needs a place …or is it all artists? For me I have always been ambivalent about shows that mention my nationality. IT IS AN IMPOSITION! The name is a construct historically and when it is used to represent ideals (I have a thing for skewed Utopias). The act of my performances (that were based on interventionist performative tools) has always been to re-insert myself into a landscape that have been made inaccessible to me (via the ingenious act that is Leviticus). When I started my tapestries they were second hand from the Salvation Army from around the corner. Ready mades, as they were preprinted with usually arcadian, docile figures. My first interventions happened on these as I would change the characters to reflect who I was …or my thoughts into this canvas landscape. There is a subversion in stripping objects of their intention. Later I started craving scale and I started doing sittings and self portraits, for example ‘Castrato as the Revolution’. It is myself creating and transforming into the ‘Ilulwane. I was born a decade before The First Parliament of democratic South Africa to a family who placed much importance on the expression of culture. My father was a journalist and boxing agent and my mother was a senior midwife and activist. Together they used to do radio plays at my dad’s work, the Transkei Broadcasting Corporation. Art has always been there for us, as we were exposed to Resistance Art in the form of Gibson Kente’s social-realist plays. Our town, East London [South Africa, not England] had one art museum, Ann Bryant, which then exposed me to the visual arts – they had everything from ethnographic booty to Kathe Kollwitz to Irma Stern and George Pemba. It was my parents who saw that I was artistic, they put me into piano classes, vocal eisteddfods, and later in 10th grade, I got enrolled into Belgravia Arts Center that had an integrated course in painting and design theory. It is also at this time that I got introduced to the petit point, I would pick it up again in the mid-noughties as studio practice. It’s become important for me to state just how much of an impact on my life the time leading up to The New South Africa is. Azania is the name I grew up being identified with, a post-apartheid, decolonial, and equal South Africa. It always felt like it was this nation-state-in-waiting, that it offered the older generation a positive focus. As time went by, we started witnessing democracy in action, I suppose, and the adverse realities of neocolonialism partnered with much corruption. Since 2010, I have been working with a counter narrative that borrows the name Azania for my story-world as a way of setting expectations that reality and nationalism betrays. It is not utopia – as to me the thought of utopia immediately is followed by the thought of exile. One can be in exile in their bodies and their native country. The Azania is then populated and decorated by my avatars who feel this way. My first memories are that of my mother and her friends in craft circles executing “umrhaso,” traditional embroidery that was based on beadwork and applique. I was taught petit point in highschool Home Economics in the late ’90s and I would pick it up again in 2004 when I started doing “craft meditations” in downtown Johannesburg with my club-kid mates from college. We were fascinated by maybe disrupting the spiritual separation in being boxed to media. The gendered view of thread-based work was another box I wanted to engage with critically while making. I’m glad you’ve asked me this question as the answer is in the definition of what a tapestry is and how I delight in disrupting it in my practice. Tapestry historically has had a utilitarian function, like for example covering large areas against the elements. They are usually woven in a loom, for example The Lady with the Unicorn. Petit point is in the tradition of embroidery and tends to lend itself to storytelling modes for example the Bayeaux tapestry. [thingcurated.com/2021/11/17/interview-south-african-artist-athi-patra-ruga-on-the-queer-avatars-that-populate-his-story-world/] External links Category:Living people Category:1984 births Category:Artists from South Africa