The Space welcomes South African curator, choreographer & director Jay Pather as its 2021 Artist & Curator in Residence.

Jay Pather is a choreographer, curator and academic. Based in Cape Town, he is an Associate Professor and directs the Institute for Creative Arts at UCT, curates Infecting the City Public Art Festival and the ICA Live Art Festival. He also curates for Afrovibes in the Netherlands and the Biennale of Body, Image Movement in Madrid, and is curatorial adviser for live art for Season Africa 2020 in various cities in France. He has co-curated for Spielart in Munich and has been Adjunct Curator for Performance at the Zeitz MOCAA. Recent addresses include for Festival of the Future City (UK), Independent Curators International (New York) and at the Haus der Kunst (Munich). He has recently published a book, Transgressions, Live Art in South Africa with Catherine Boulle, Recent articles appear in Changing Metropolis ll, Rogue Urbanism, Performing Cities and Where Strangers Meet. He chaired the jury for the recent International Award for Public Art, was appointed Fellow at the University of London and was recently made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of Arts and Letters) by the French Government.

Featured project_Body of Evidence

Drawn from films and different times, the protagonists of Body of Evidence seem to be the proponents of an anatomist science fiction, with a strange and fragmented narrative, like this body which appears in sections, from head to toe, on the background screen. This is the space-time of dreams and memories, the re-reading of an uncertain and phantasmatic history. Body of Evidence is a work which is as much plastic as choreographic or musical. There is an operatic dimension which mixes the past with a present where issues of gender and sex involve themselves in the most deeply rooted convictions, perverting cultural models. Who are the heroes? Who are the victims? Boundaries blur, identities dissolve, the piece builds up signs and styles, bringing in other stories and structuring itself as if unconscious, with a return of the displaced… in this case the corpus delicti.

“One of the most harrowing characteristics of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the narrativising of trauma. Apartheid was overt and covert, immersive, unending and pervasive. In the wake of such sophisticated strategic execution of trauma, the TRC posited a straightforward confessional exposition, dramatic builds, climactic admissions, quick character turnarounds, and together with mystifying the relationship between trauma and economics, grand gestures of compassion and neat endings. Was this belief in the narrative form borne out of a naiveté that underestimated the pervasive reach of apartheid or a move that was egged on by the expedient project of holding on to white capital and stabilizing South Africa’s relationship with world markets? How then have artists responded to the narrative form inside of the theatrical frame in the representation of trauma? Some theatre makers have mirrored this reductive approach in representations of trauma, creating works that lock us in a hermetically sealed world replete with cathartic endings. Others have chosen a more unpopular route and destabilized this, tackling the very form of performance, the act of viewing itself, inviting a range of subjectivities and initiating agency in making meaning.” - Jay Pather