Athi-Patra Ruga and the politics of context

Abstract

Though little critical writing has emerged on the work of young South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga, interpretations by those critics and curators who do engage his practice tend to read the work through the veils of various contextual analyses. Sexuality, African urbanity, HIV/AIDS, and the place of queerness in postcolonial and post-apartheid milieus are certainly all themes with which Ruga's work resonates. However, in this short article I suggest, as an alternative approach to these themes and their relevance to Ruga, that the very notion that context informs production is at stake throughout his oeuvre. At the heart of Athi-Patra Ruga's work is an engagement with the politics of context, rather than the context of politics. Mainstream contemporary art production and criticism in South Africa, meanwhile, are preoccupied with the semantic inverse of this, the context of politics. Artists and their works are often ruthlessly checked and balanced against a schema of political concerns important in other realms of South African society) but instrumentalising when applied as standards to artists and their work. This hermetic view disarms art and removes its real political potency, which is its capacity to shift the coordinates of a philosophical and social system in which quotidian politics takes form. Ruga's work defies the subjection of art to context, in that it skims the issues-centred politics of the day only in order to show that there is something more profoundly political at stake: our sense of historical, physical, sexual and psychological place. Geographical placings and displacements are used in many of his works as analogies for contextual breaks and ruptures. The scenarios constructed in his work are typically reflections on displacement--as an active forsaking or erasure of place, rather than merely helpless loss. In Miss Congo (2007), a three-channel video documentary of three performances conducted in Kinshasa, Ruga stitches a tapestry while sitting or lying in entirely anonymous places on the urban outskirts. In one of the three channels Ruga lies on a rubbish heap--not strewn, but lounging there with the cast-away rags and scrap. Scattered around him is an assortment of toy aeroplanes, equally out of place on this terrestrial heap. His performance of stitching (a conventionally domestic activity culturally associated with women, rather than men) in a place so unlike home, establishes the extreme placelessness of this work--a contradiction of the geographic specificity of the title. His choice to recline on the rubbish heap in the third channel shows that his displacement is deliberate. He is not the victim of an external force, but is actively choosing his lack of place. In a later series of works produced while on a residency at the Zentrum for Kulturproduction in Bern, Switzerland, Ruga's displacement was less deliberate, but still absolute. In a work titled Even I Exist in Embo: Jaundiced Tales of Counterpenetration (2007), Ruga roamed the high streets of Bern in the form of the Inj'ibhabha, a faceless, black mass of curled hair which Ruga calls the 'afro-womble'. With no face the Inj'ibhabha is an outsider to human society, and his blackness establishes him as an obvious outsider in Bern, a city populated overwhelmingly by white Europeans. He relocates to a glacial Swiss hinterland where he wanders, unable to integrate with Bern's urban society. His characters paradoxically occupy non-places, and there, from the periphery of place-ness itself, are in a position to show us a meta-contextual realm in which art can operate without the imperative of being ensconced in a particular context. The minutiae of particular contexts are always retained in his work, but in such a way that they are porous; undermining the foundational assumption that art is absolutely indebted to, and at the mercy of, the system in which it is produced. One frame of reference in which Ruga explicitly positions his work is the neglected tradition of camp in South African performance and visual art. …