Urban Scenographies Johannesburg launches
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On Thursday February 19 Intermission hosted a soiree in the sky for the joint launch of Urban Scenographies Johannesburg and VANSA Public Art Survivor. The event took place on the 19th floor of the Lister Building on Jeppe Street, flanked by spectacular panoramas of the inner city – the space that for the next few weeks Urban Scenographies artists will read as a stage, a marketplace, a battleground and a field of play. For more about these curatorial frames click here.
Instead of the speechification that typically inaugurates arts projects or exhibitions at these kinds of events, Urban Scenographies and Public Art Survivor were introduced with six brief presentations by various stakeholders in the projects. First up were Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter of the Trinity Session, one of the project coordinators for Public Art Survivor, followed by Joseph Gaylard (JPP), Solam Mkhabela and Kirsten Doermann (Black Lines on White Paper Architects), Jean-Christophe Lanquetin (Scu²), Lesley Perkes (AAW) and Steven Sack (City of Johannesburg). In these image-driven presentations each speaker had twenty images to present to the audience and twenty seconds to speak about each image. One of the artists participating in Urban Scenographies Johannesburg, Nástio Mosquito (Angola), closed off the round of presentations with his interpretation of the brief – an aggressive spoken word performance about the self, or the ego, and the city, contemporary meanings of mortality and late capitalist narcissism. Instead of accompanying images though, Nástio had a tray of eggs he would smash against the floor at emphatic moments in his monologue. This punctuatory egg-hurling had those sitting on the front row couches in the line of fire.
Watch this space for a video upload of the performance.
For next week’s series of artist’s presentations click here for more.
