Athi-Patra Ruga at Nordwind Hamburg

WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to announce that Athi-Patra Ruga will be premiering his performance ‘Queens in Exile’ – featuring Angel-Ho and Tanya Tagaq, at the Nordwind Festival in Hamburg on the 16th of December 2017 .

In this performance, the South African performer and visual artist Athi-Patra Ruga and the Canadian singer Tanya Tagaq gives voice to Throat Singing, a traditional First Nations songform animating Athi-Patra Ruga’s epitome The Versatile Queen Ivy (2013-Present). In his interdisciplinary work spanning video, dance, photography and performance, Athi-Patra Ruga questions identity constructions that are clearly determined by gender, nationality and sexuality. For NORDWIND, Athi-Patra Ruga and Tanya Tagaq are working together for the first time to present songs of expulsion and unrequited love, which set the attitude to life of a generation in exile and build a musical bridge between the Canadian throat singing and the overtone singing (“umngqokolo”) of the Xhosa. With the concert performance QUEENS IN EXILE they celebrate together with the musician and performer Angel-Ho a dystopian ritual of abysmal energy.

Time: Saturday 16 December at 21h00
Venue: Kampnagel – K2 [Hamburg]
Tickets: 15 euros
Duration: approx. 60 min
In English and Xhosa

Click here for more information.

Dan Halter at the Konstmuseet in Skövde

WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to announce that Dan Halter will be exhibiting a solo exhibition titled ‘Zimbabwean Traffic’ in the museum at the Skövde Kulturhus. The exhibition will open on this Thursday (14th of December) at 17h00, and run until 18 March 2018.

Dan Halter left Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe’s major land reforms in the early 2000s and has since lived in South Africa. In his artistic practice, he often departs from his own experiences, where he is both carrying on the refugee’s absence and longing for his homeland while, as a white man, he also wrestles with questions about guilt and inherited privileges. He often works in various craft traditions with simple materials when he makes pictures and installations in which colonialism and its consequences are explored, and topics such as South Africa and Zimbabwe’s history and contemporary are dealt with alongside themes such as migration, national identity and borders.

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Athi-Patra Ruga wins Grand Prize at the 11th Edition of Rencontres de Bamako in Mali

WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to announce that Athi-Patra Ruga has been awarded the Seydou Keïta Prize (Grand Prize) of Les Rencontres de Bamako by the Malian Ministry of Culture. Ruga’s work is included in the Pan African Exhibition at the National Museum of Mali, as part of the Rencontres de Bamako/ biennale africaine de la photographie which will run until the 31 of January 2018.

The selected artists – as witness bearers and agents for change for Africa – have been invited to examine the transformations of the modern world and possible new developments for the continent. By means of the various projects chosen, this collective exhibition showcases the scope of possibilities and unprecedented freedom of the artists in depicting the world for us. The project is similar to what Achille Mbembe has called “the memory’s poetic output”: a work of reassembly in the present, producing meaning. Through their great diversity of approaches and visual languages, the 40 artists and collectives generate alternative narratives about Africa that build new bonds with the past, shed light on the present and open up perspectives for the future. After Bamako, the 11th Rencontres will be shown in the Netherlands in April 2018 in partnership with the Museum of World Cultures.

For more information on the awards click here and for more information on the biennale click here.