Arcade 24

ABOUT

Live Art Arcade 2024

Dwelling in sites, spaces and places, Arcade2024 produces an assemblage of experimental live art encounters: an arcade of durational, itinerant and cyclical live art, where all events happen simultaneously, and audience-participants engage with the works at their own discretion and structure their journeys as they wish. Produced by ICA with additional support from the Network for Embodied Research in Africa. Curated by Gavin Krastin, with dramaturgical assistance by Alan Parker.

Carin Bester | Dust to Dust

This performance installation considers the artist’s connection with nature, soil and land. Bester creates a space in which to reflect on laboring and healing of the landscape and oneself.

Kaulana Williams | Picking up the Pieces

The artist constructs a holding space for grief, emotional devastation and the painful efforts of trying to stitch oneself back together again. A tabreez is created in real-time and the audience are invited to assist in its stitching.

Marlon Pokpas | Magnum Opus

Pokpas offers his body as a terrain for the audience’s engagement. With the assistance of a tattoo artist, individuals are invited to participate in the transformation of their body into a canvas of doodles by perfect strangers.

Mmatumisang Kgosigadi ya ga Motsisi | Kganya – Calling the Flowers Home

This performance is a journey of return, restoration and reconnection through intimacy with Cape Town’s indigenous plant kin. Over a cyclical process, the artist endeavors to place-make and consider pre-built environments.

Luke Rudman | Dressing room for 7

This live painting performance explores the idea of the dressing room as a site of queer identity construction – particularly the backstage happenings, hidden from the audience, in preparation for a drag show.

Nqoba Boyi| Indoda, uzimelegeqe (A man who stands on his own)

Boyi deconstructs and reconstructs the symbols and materialities used in initiation ceremonies. Through a process of performance alchemy, old objects are braided into new imaginaries.

Nokulunga Masia & Azole Tima| Cry if you want to

The two artists, alone and together, perform, play and improvise with familiar rituals and symbols of celebration as scenographic devices while exploring the question, “What is there to celebrate?”

Gavin Krastin is a South African creator, curator and educator of live art performance. 

DIRECTIONS