House Arrest: August Focus Donna Kukama
The Lit-Rear-View: Window, Basement, Mirror, Shed, Time
by Donna Kukama
August 14 - 29, 2021
Open Saturdays & Sundays 1-5pm and by appointment
Admission is free, reservations required
For the duration of her residency, Donna Kukama presents weekly texts (written, read, performed, projected) in conversation with existing domestic spaces and objects at Glasshouse. This performative intervention highlights her physical absence while amplifying a presence of “texts that are not seen”. These “unseen texts” become tools for addressing historical erasures and marginalisation by finding sites for articulating trauma, recovery, and healing.
Kukama’s argument is for a consideration of performance art as an expanded form of writing, where to read, to write, and to become can exist simultaneously. She uses specific objects and architectural structures such as "the window", “the basement”, "the mirror", and "the clock" to create texts and gestures in dialogue with other artists, writers, thinkers, and ways of navigating the world that are absent.
The Lit-Rear-View:Part 1 is a playful subversion of the academic literature review. It is a performance about absence, without the physical presence of the performer(s). The resulting and continuously shifting site-specific multimedia installation will be open for public viewings/listenings/readings/encounters on weekends between 1 and 5pm, with a public closing event on August 28th.
14th August 2021 (The Window)
15th August 2021 (The Basement)
21st August 2021 (Mirrors)
28th & 29th August (Accumulation)
As part of The Lit-Rear-View:Part 1 and parallel to the “open weekends”, Kukama builds an ongoing archive of daily writing practices in the form of process notes, texts, and drawings that may also include documented, unrealized, failed or imagined propositions for performative interventions. Daily writings/sketches/documents will be archived over a period of 21 days (August 8th - August 29th) and can be accessed on public weekends or by appointment. A comprehensive online archive will be made accessible at a later stage.
About The Artist:
Donna Kukama is a transdisciplinary artist and creative researcher whose practice presents institutions, books, monuments, gestures of protest, and economies that are as real as they are fictitious. Her practice takes on an experimental form, shifting between performance, video, text, sound, and multimedia installations, with the aim to subvert how histories and value systems are constructed.
Kukama has exhibited and presented performances at several notable institutions and museums, including the Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, Kunsthal KaDe in Amersfoort, Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea Milano in Milan, South African National Gallery in Cape Town, Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp, Tate Modern in London, nGbK in Berlin, and the New Museum in New York. She has participated in the 57th Belgrade Biennale; 12th Lyon Biennale; the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo; 8th Berlin Biennale (as CHR); the 10th Berlin Biennale‘s public programme, as well as the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. She is the 2014 recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art and was a nominee for the MTN New Contemporaries Award (2010) and the Visible Award (as NON-NON Collective), 2011.
House Arrest
A house-wide performance art installation and a series of performance exhibitions by artists in residence Sindy Butz, Emilio Rojas and Donna Kukama.
The term ‘House Arrest’, which serves as the theme for Glasshouse's opening season, generally refers to a legal measure confining a person to their residence; most recently domestic confinement became a symbol of our time; yet the motivation behind the theme of ‘House Arrest’ is to embody the historic role of the home in the evolution of the archive, especially that of performance as a social theater, focusing on the performativity of the domestic archive, it’s fluidity in showcasing what is intentionally archived and how life interferes and intertwines with the archive and its keepers. The artists in residence, their work displayed, the audience watching and keeping record are all part of that performative "arrest”.
About Glasshouse-
Glasshouse is regularly organizing, producing and hosting performances, thematic exhibitions, festivals and a residency program alongside an ongoing installation spread throughout the house. Some of our notable programming over recent years include The Neo-domesticities 100h Performance Art Festival (2017), Sites of Absence- Post Presence in Performance exhibition (2016), Archiving The Now (2013), The Cinema of Transgression Festival (2013) and many more.
Glasshouse is also the art installation of artists Lital Dotan & Eyal Perry. When not hosting performances an exhibition of performance based works- video installations, works on paper, documentations and sculptures, spread thematically throughout the premises- comes to life. Guided tours can be scheduled by appointment.
Alongside Glasshouse's public program the unique nature of this domestic environment allows a deep research into the nature of performance, exploring themes such as unannounced gestures, one-to-one performances, extended durational work, accumulated performances and archives of presence and absence; thus expanding the taxonomy of performative practice. These activities as a whole are being interweaved with and by our daily practice and life.