Barbara McCullough, Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification, 1979

Dineo Seshee Bopape, a love supreme, 2006

Sarah Maldoror, Et les chiens se taisaient, 1978

It Is What It Isn’t

Film Programme

Dineo Seshee Bopape, Barbara McCullough, Sarah Maldoror

Curated by Ben Albertyn

Long Gallery - 05.09.2024 - 26.09.2024

The genre of performance film is loosely applied to artworks that come about where the modernist traditions of moving image and performance art converge. It Is What It Isn’t highlights three such films that, notably, use performance as an expression of alienation, which is at the heart of modern performance in all its forms. Whether in the more conceptual register of Dineo Seshee Bopape, the tradition of public performance that Barbara McCullough explores or the theatrical mode of Sarah Maldoror, each work relies on a central performance to articulate a certain non-alignment or embodied contradiction. The principal player in Bopape’s a love supreme (2006) is the artist herself, who, over the course of the film, licks a thick layer of chocolate off the screen, clearing the way for us to see her. Here, the performer is alienated from their own image, split by the medium, while also demonstrating the most basic desire of performance: to make oneself legible to the audience. In McCullough’s Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979), Yolanda Vidato is alienated from her immediate environment, brooding against the urban decay of Watts, Los Angeles. Her lone figure seems at once defiant and bored, as if she is not quite present for her own intervention. Finally, Maldoror stages Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient (1978) in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, wherein Gabriel Glissant’s portrayal of a rebel condemned to death gives a sense of world-historical alienation. “I want to be alone in my skin,” he cries, but cannot untangle himself. Herein lies the strange contradiction that the medium of performance reveals to us: like the actor who loses sight of himself in his encounter with the audience, we are alienated by our boundedness to the world.

Throughout the exhibition run, each film will be screened for one week. The programming schedule will run as follows:

Programme 1: 5 September – 12 September

a love supreme (2006) by Dineo Seshee Bopape

Programme 2: 12 September – 19 September

Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) by Barbara McCullough

Programme 3: 19 September – 26 September

Et les chiens se taisaient (1978) by Sarah Maldoror

This exhibition was made possible thanks to the City of Cape Town’s support.