It’s art! It’s live! UCT’s Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) is entering the final week, hosting its flagship ICA Live Art Festival in 2022.
“It is designed to challenge and extend the public’s experience of live art in a non-commercial environment and make accessible the work of creatives ranging from visual and performing artists who explore new forms, break boundaries, flout aesthetic conventions, tackle controversy, confront audiences and experiment with perceptions.”
This year the festival has been held from 19 March to 3 April 2022 in various venues in Cape Town, including at the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens.
Running themes for the festival include sentient being, the earth still shakes, public intimacies and Performative Utopias. sentient being speaks to the idea of consciousness in all that lives, a way of approaching a perennial ICA theme, the age of the Anthropocene, comprising a collection of works that will be performed in collaboration with the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden; the earth still shakes comprises a series of works that address the continued if not worsening precarity of people in the wake of a lack of transformation; public intimacies considers what intimacy means in the wake of a pandemic and other intensities, embodying the paradox of the pressure on and the necessity for intimacy; and Performative Utopias, a tribute to the late curator Dominique Malaquais, embraces the possibilities and impossibilities of utopian futures.
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The 38 productions feature creatives from a range of countries, though primarily from South Africa. Featured South African artists include Tracey Rose, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Rehane Abrahams, Phumulani Ntuli, Albert Khoza, Ilze Wolff, Ntone Edjabe, Qondiswa James and Gavin Krastin. Also appearing will be Nora Chipaumire from New York/Harare, Androa Kolo from Paris/Kinshasa, Syowia Kyambi from Nairobi, and from Yaoundé – Zora Snake and Christian Etongo.
The festival also includes a discourse programme featuring conversations with artists, and includes a presentation by Julie Peghini from Paris 8 University and Bénédicte Alliot, director general of the Cité internationale des arts on Performative Utopias.
