A Conversation with ... South African Artist Christine Dixie on the Exhibition opening: "To Be King"
Abstract
- Abstract
- The Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence has invited South African artist Christine Dixie to show her multimedia installation "To Be King" at Iwalewahaus. The artist based in Johannesburg set up her installation and celebrated the exhibition opening on Wednesday, 11 May 2022. The exhibition will run until the end of July. The interview was conducted by Nicole Klug.
Description
- Transcript
- yes hello i'm here today at the ivaniba house with christine dixie an artist from south africa whom we've had the great pleasure of working with within the last one and a half weeks and hosting at the ibaliba house christine's work has regularly been exhibited in south africa the u.s and europe she's primarily a printmaker but her art also finds expression through films and elaborate installations such as the one you see behind me here at ibaliba house today welcome christine thank you christine with your work you challenge gender roles and the way in which they have been historically conditioned by society myths and image making how did you integrate feminist concerns uh within the to be king installation so the one um way that i did it was that i inact velazquez the painter and in one of the scenes i paint a mustache onto myself with a paint brush not a makeup brush with a paint brush paint in the starshine paint my heavy eyebrows on and obviously here i am a woman long grand hair and the the juxtaposition of the moustache and the eyebrows is kind of an ironic reference to the fact that i am not velasquez obviously um so that is the the one way that i kind of mark the fact that i'm a woman artist uh playing the role of a male artist velazquez um himself was very entranced with rubens who he completely admired and rubens's paintings are in the background of the las meninas painting so for my re-enactment i was thinking the one artist that i completely admire and would be my reubens is william cantridge so in the background i have two um references to william cambridge paintings another male artist obviously so here i am surrounded in fact by these male artists so that is a kind of ironic reference to the art world where predominantly male artists have had more success than female artists right the manifestation of the colonial history that is still evident in wakanda the eastern cape city where you're from today has compelled your preoccupation with europe's legacy in africa so how would you say does this to be king installation fit into postcolonial context which creative means have you employed to express these issues um so one of the things that i found really interesting was that the prada where las meninas hands opened its doors to the public in 1820 and 1820 was the year in which my british ancestors from england arrived in the eastern cape and then made their way to graham's town namakanda so it just seemed to me this strange relationship about what was happening in these two very different parts of the world in the installation i use a space just outside of makanda which is called burnt crom and burned crawl was a tract of land which was first a kind of cattle as a space where cattle uh were kept and owned by a um a dutch settler called pete who's infamous actually as being one of the fourth wreckers so they're kind of the first dutch colonialists and then in 1970 the attractive land was taken on by the military and was used as a shooting so this attractive land is what i kind of use as my way of negotiating a kind of space in the periphery that has a lot of significant meaning and speaks to the kind of european center which is also in the video the other way that i think is not maybe not as obvious but throughout the video there a ship sails across the horizon and that ship is the ship that carried goods but also slaves from one part of the world to another so those two ways are significant in the video your work is included in national and international collections including among others the new york public library the smithsonian national museum of african art the standard bank gallery the johannesburg art gallery the durban art gallery the iseco national museum of south africa and the nelson mandela metropolitan museum of art i know we had talked about the different perspectives and the justification positions of various aspects of the exhibition creating always new intersections and destabilizing narratives as you have traveled to these many locations along with your art how has your experience been altered by the location how did that impact the art how was your experience then perceived differently the message perceived differently by the audience and what for instance were markedly different perceptions by the audience and of course in turn how did that change your experience when i first showed this installation it was in the albany history museum in wakanda which was then grandstand in 2014 and the albany history museum was set up as a museum to honor the 1820 settlers which is obviously now hugely problematic the the space that i um used uh to show the installation is like upstairs in the albany history museum was upstairs in the albany history museum and [Music] i became very aware of the the gap the the strangeness of trying to create this european masterpiece in this very um eastern cape south african environment so as you you know you come in from the street which is a very local african space and then you're suddenly in a museum which is trying to create a european space and the dislocation in fact became part of the meaning i liked the fact that there was this dislocation also what i discovered when i spoke to the students in particular was that they had no well very few of them actually had intimate knowledge of the last and las meninas so that was they they recognized the landscape they recognized us on african landscape hr had recreated they also picked up on nuances that maybe a european arts audience wouldn't pick up on that refers specifically to south african myth and history so that was something that i i had to kind of negotiate in that space when i took it to to venice and london which were the first places where i showed it in europe it was like it had turned on its head suddenly i was aware of the fact that i had taken on this complete icon something that i kind of knew but i hadn't really really understood until i was in europe and you know that saying fools go where angels here to tread i felt a little bit like that so there i had to explain the south african context and for example in the video there's this one character who stands in the doorway is wearing a t-shirt called sohti and he walks into the space of the of the court now in south africa most people know the reference to sote do you know the references no i don't so certi is a colloquialism for or short for so to peel and soak peel is a character that stands with his one foot in africa and his other foot in europe and because his penis is dangling down in between these two feet it is getting salty in the atlantic ocean so so to peel refers to a character that is a liminal character between places and that character in the painting as many nuts is a liminal character because he's halfway in the door and halfway out the door so i was referencing the fact that there is this liminal space that so tea occupies now in south africa i don't have to explain that right but when i was in europe suddenly i have to explain what that means right so it's just one example of how this interpretation shifts with with every different place that i go you've had a very prolific year so far for instance you have just opened an exhibition in march of 2022 titled at better street makanda at the gallery of sargi chair at the university of johannesburg moreover you have opened an exhibition titled the blueprint for the disorder of things in april 2022 at the wits art museum with blueprint for the disorder of things you again use texts by phukul i believe this is a body of work which also continues to work you had started with your to be king work and with that installation what are those themes that you have started with to be king and now continue to work with on this new exhibition and how have you progressed your interrogation of these topics blueprint for the disorder of things began when we were in hard lockdown in 2020 in south africa and because we were in hard lockdown i had to work with things that were already in my space which is why i went back to this text which it was which i had made copper plates from of so i i had those plates already and i wanted to do something with them and here was an opportunity i had to somehow find something that i could work with right in to be king the artist figure that is a silhouette is made up of text from las meninas because las meninas so it superimposes the artist the last quiz with the text of las meninas and so there's a kind of uh something that is that comes together between text and image right so the idea of text and image has also been something i've continued to be interested in in blueprint for the disorder of things again i wanted to find a way to disrupt text through image i was very anxious when the pandemic started and i found that i'd read a passage and realized i hadn't taken anything in i'd start at the top again and read it and i was almost in too much of a state of stress or anxiety to absorb what was going on so i wasn't trying to find a visual way to describe how i couldn't read nothing made sense anymore because obviously language is about making sense of things so one of the ways i did this was through taking the text of las meninas and just embossing it which means that you can't see it only through shadow can you actually read the text the other way i did it was through um overlay prints with other prints and images so that the text almost becomes obscured so the idea of disorder is becomes visually apparent right the idea of not making sense of things of disorder as opposed to because the order of things was something i wanted to play with the other way in which i continued a theme that ran through from to be king to blueprint for the disorder of things was the character of the princess so the princess becomes a figure in blueprint or the disorder of things who is a life-giving force she is the character that holds a paintbrush is i suppose a character that is creative she is juxtaposed to a playing doctor who has medical instruments coming out of its head and around its waist has also these medical instruments and i suppose is like a scientific way of looking at the plague and the pandemic so these two characters became juxtaposed and interact with each other in the nest this next body of work so in those those ways the themes through came through to the king into blueprint for the disorder of things again i used a video as a way of animating some of these characters which is um there's something that happened in to became as well to be king obviously is founded in historicity it does however also highlight universal contemporary notions and existences uh it reveals underlying social and cultural dynamics and so forth does it not i think so i think one of the main concerns in to be king which is obviously a could be a contemporary concern of everyone's is the relationship of power how do we um how do we see the world through whose gaze do we see the world right how are things prioritized i mean and that is very much a concern that runs through from history to the present day the the idea into the king is that the king controls the way we see the world but who is king now i mean it could be netflix it could be um trump it could be elon musk and twitter you know so those how who's who's controlling the way we look at the world and i think that concern is um has been maybe embodied in the king in the past but now maybe he has a multiplicity of ways of control and i think makes it a contemporary concern as well thank you thank you for coming here for joining us at the ibaliba house so amazing really it's been a wonderful wonderful experience and thank you also for taking the time today to speak to me it's been really it's been a very rewarding experience you
Origins & context
- Title
- A Conversation with ... South African Artist Christine Dixie on the Exhibition opening: "To Be King"
- Language
- English
- YouTube playlist
- A Conversation with ...
- Date
- May 31, 2022
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