The Intervention on the Anglo Boer Monument ,2015
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Notes : Athi-Patra Ruga is a multidisciplinary artist who uses his own imagined fictional characters to explore notions of utopia and dystopia in a post-apartheid South Africa. In many of his performances, Ruga’s characters confront colonial-era monuments and landmarks, reclaiming them for the artist’s utopian nation of Azania.This still is taken from Ruga’s performance at the 2012 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown where one of the artist’s most prominent characters, the Future White Woman of Azania (FWWOA), is seen bursting paint-filled balloons against the Winged Angel of Peace, erected on Bathurst street to commemorate fallen soldiers in the Boer War. The artist refers to this act as ‘counter-penetration’; the non-destructive protest against and reclamation of signifiers in a dystopian nation.
Lisa Truter
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