video poetry performance

enough. 2009.

Sometimes you’ve had enough. And sometimes you have enough. A fusion of sound and light, Kai Lossgott’s and Mbali Vilakazi’s authentic and intimate multimedia poetry performance "enough" takes you into the dream cycles of obsessive behaviour and uncomfortable truths in the search for wholeness. It is about the breakdown of society, and people at breaking point.

Badilisha Poetry Xchange! May 2009. Africa Centre, Cape Town.

urban oral history video project

The City Breath Festival of Video Poetry and Performance. 2009.

CITY BREATH is an urban oral history video project. Apart from existing works, it initiates and develops new collaborations in the areas of the video poem, screen dance and experimental film. These short video 'breaths' or 'gasps' seek to interrogate the official understandings of South African cities given to us in television, film and other mass media. Screening submissions from around South Africa, the project will screen as a video installation in Cape Town's inner city. It will also show in Johannesburg's inner city. Participating electronics shops screen selected works during this time in both cities, connected on a visitor's map.

A special selection of video poems first premiered at the Badilisha Poetry Xchange in May 2009. Cape Town.

artist's book

talking to the tree outside my window while I sleep. 2008.

This book emerges from the silence of sleep and the haptic. Luminous and transparent, it is a fragmentary collection of 'other' bodies, layers and modalities of human experience which seek to rediscover a biocentric position in a human-centred world.

Print '08 : Myth Memory and the Archive. August / September 2008. Bell-Roberts Gallery. Cape Town. SASOL New Signatures 2009, Pretoria.

plant leaf engravings

nothing with skin is blind. 2008.

I suspect that on a cellular level our bodies recall the evolutionary stage when we were plants, and that this influences our perception of the world in ways we are not aware of. 'Nothing with skin is blind' makes reference to cellular memory and engrams, a postulated biological change in neural tissue that represents a memory.  Plant, human or animal, our biological processes bear certain similarities.  It is through these similarities that I draw into question the boundaries between different forms of sentient life and where exactly consciousness begins.  

nothing with skin is blind. Gordart Gallery, April / May 2008. Johannesburg. SASOL New Signatures Art Awards 2008, Pretoria Art Museum. Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees, Oudtshoorn. Intervention, UNISA Gallery, September / October 2008. Pretoria. Dystopia, May 2009 - Jan 2010, UNISA Gallery, Pretoria. Museum Africa, Johannesburg. Oliewnhuis Art Museum, Mangaung. Jan Colle Galerij, Ghent, Belgium. Collections: SASOL Art Collection, UNISA Permanent Collection, Nirox Foundation Collection.

video

cull ' tivate. 2008.

During a long period of illness in which I could not leave the house, I began to intuit how keenly our bodily processes are aligned to the coming and going of the sun, to subtle rhythms which depend entirely on the time of day. If there was a natural 'language', an unconscious rhythm of silence and sound that ran through every living thing, this was where to find it: deep in the body.

Gordart Gallery, April 2008. Johannesburg. ABSA l'Atelier Art Awards 2008, ABSA Gallery. Johannesburg.

performance

Unsaid. 2007.

Fear 'chokes us up'. We 'get a frog in our throat'. This performance is about communication or lack there of - what is said, what can be said, what cannot be said, what we are afraid to say, what bottles us up inside. What we say and how we say it has a ripple effect on the people and the environment around us.

Spier Contemporary Art Awards 2007, Cape Town, Johannesburg. Special mention.

video

alpha. 2007.

If you repeatedly forgot every person you knew, and searched for ciphers that might remain, you might in your surrender discover the approach of some imaginary person, half sensed, half-glimpsed by intuition.

ABSA l'Atelier Awards 2007, Johannesburg. 6th flEXiff (first and last Experimental international film festival), 2008, Sydney. 11th annual Antimatter Underground Film Festival, 2008, Victoria, Canada.  INVIDEO XVIII Edition, 2008, Milan. VIDEOFORMES 2009, Clermont-Ferrand, France. 24 Hours Nuremberg Filmfestival 2008, Germany. 21st Annual Dallas Video Festival, Angelika Film Center, Dallas. Cologne Online Film Festival IV, Museum of Contemporary Art, Maracaibo/Venezuela.

a motion image poem for surveillance camera monitor

Secret language of the bourgeoisie. 2004.

A meditation on polite distance and the emotional and spiritual repression of (overwhelmingly 'white') middle-class life behind the ornate security fencing of the suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Ekurhuleni Art Awards 2004.

video installation

Armed and Ready. 2004.

Symbols culled from the colonial alphabet of security fences  subversively invade a young white man's body without his awareness.  Multiplying on his pale skin like a Victorian virus, they invoke the story of his middle-class illusions of power.

Brett Kebble Awards 2004, Cape Town. Whitechapel Gallery, London.

video installation

After Purity. 2003.

photo-documentary

Dangerously Safe.  2003.

These documentary photographs compare the earliest grave markers in the Primrose Hill cemetary with the security fencing in the suburb which today surrounds it. Only the road around the cemetery divides the land containing death from the land which excludes it.

performance

House. 2001.

Through the metaphors of high risk acrobatic dance theatre and pyromania, the western obsession with cleaning and conquering is interrogated in a ruined house used as a toilet by local homeless people.