Johannesburg, Dance Factory, 30, 31 October, 1 November
All too familiar to every suburban South African, the ‘Guard’s hut’ has been absorbed into our collective landscape. Not only have we integrated this object into our lives, we have also struck up an interdependent relationship with it, whereby the object represents the black unarmed and benign ‘Superhero’ who we hope will be our ‘protector’ and we are the ‘protected’.
We turn the guard into a superhero and yet we are consumed by the underlying fear that he will prove all too human and fallible - that he may not even have the resources, the will or the capacity to call upon the back-up superhero – the potentially effective ‘white superhero’ who ironically represents the dark side of our history and who we possibly fear the most.
The question ‘who’s guard is on shift’, is to be investigated in the multimedia, inter disciplinary installation ‘Guard on Shift’ – a collaboration between Sue Pam-Grant and Xoli Norman, to be produced by Indra Wussow and her German based cultural foundation “kunst:raum sylt quelle”.
The artist and director Sue Pam-Grant and music composer Xoli Norman investigate the tenuous and visceral areas that occupy our physical and mental territories. This allows for a scrutiny of our collective paranoia – a critical boundary between our physical fences and the space occupied inside the walls of our minds.
„Guard on shift “ is the prologue to a series of cultural events and lectures on the topic „Domestic Security – how paranoia is influencing social coexistence“ curated by Indra Wussow.
Pressjozi art:lab presents Guard on Shift in Kliptown
