HEAT will set flames under Cape Town’s siloed communities

An artwork by Charity Vilakazi, one of the artists showing at the Kalashnikovv gallery during the HEAT festival (Photograph: Supplied)

By Voni Baloyi

4 Jul 2024

As we find ourselves in unprecedented political times, Common Ground, the title and theme of the HEAT Winter Arts Festival, has never been this necessary since the advent of our democracy.

A government of national unity is uncharted territory for our country, yet it pulls the cover off years of political minutiae as a participatory government has never been more urgent than at this moment.

In any event of cohesion, there has to be an acknowledgement of difference coupled with every individual, whether Black, Coloured, Indian, white or Asian, who must feel they have a stake in this country, geographically, politically and economically.

Similarly, HEAT, which runs in Cape Town’s city centre from 11 to 21 July, calls on a multitude of stakeholders, galleries, artists, musicians, theatre practitioners and comics as we attempt to dissolve the cultural silos that have existed in Cape Town for generations.

When dissolving these silos, participants seek to answer the question: how do we go about finding common ground even in our differences, opposing worldviews, and violent colonial histories embedded in this nation’s fabric?

HEAT situates its main thesis within the question of what conditions facilitate “common ground”; questions of community and collaboration become integral to the cultural practices and the 15 galleries that are being platformed.

Moving beyond the brick-and-mortar of the exhibition, collaborations such as Reservoir Projects, founded by Heinrich Groenewald and Shona van der Merwe, and Fede founded by Lebo Kekana, embark on a generative artistic exercise that interrogates vernacular ecologies through inviting artists who engage with sustainable matter through the materiality of wood and plant.

Kathryn Yussoff, when meditating on white geologies and the Anthropocene, reminds us how precolonial relationships with the land, particularly exercised by indigenous peoples, were harmonious and then perverted through the rise of colonialism, industrial revolutions, geographical apartheid and modern Western practices that have had the biggest impact on our climate.

HEAT Songezo Zantsi, Silapha, 2024, oil on canvas, 128 x 155 cm. Artworks © Songezo Zantsi. (Photo: Vela Projects / Paris Brummer)

As we explore indigenous vernaculars, Fede and Reservoir showcase a group exhibition, including established artists – such as Atang Tshikare and Dada Khanyisa – who have mastered the harmonious labouring of material such as wood.

Similarly, common ground is created through communal collaboration between Sisonke Gallery, a hotel gallery, and Union House run by the Spier Arts Trust, to exhibit a group show, fittingly titled Unfiltered. It presents artists’ works that have been too controversial to exhibit, whether owing to their explicit content or politically complex themes that have scared galleries or buyers away.

Pondering this fascinating curatorial approach brings me to the foot of our Constitution and the fine boundaries between freedom of speech, substantive equality and what has been all too familiar in South Africa with our very own Penny Sparrow and DA MP Renaldo Gouws characters – the rise in hate speech.

A democratic state is always trying to find this balance and art is the perfect playground as we champion freedom of expression while working to protect those identities that are most vulnerable because of historic oppression.

I am excited to see this showcase of about 150 works set to be the “controversial” talk of the town during this inaugural festival.

Staying for a moment with this elusive concept of identities, what has organically surfaced in our call as curators for exhibition and theatre proposals for the festival is critical engagement with multiple expressions of queer identities and how they situate themselves in the socio-geographical landscape of Cape Town.

Beginning at the home base of HEAT at 99 Loop, we have a formidable group show that reflects on the practice of self-portraiture but done through a community of artists.

Trans artist and queer activist Robert Hamblin, who is part of the group show, will also be participating in the Meet the Artists event where queer identity is not necessarily essentialised but rather read alongside multiple other identities that artists inhabit beyond the queer.

A great addition to the festival is Nel Gallery’s programme which includes M.R.R.T and Courage (Memory, Remembrance, Resilience, Trauma & Courage), a short film by Xhosa artist Wandie M (this is how the artist prefers to be known) which premiered in 2021 at the pan-African LGBTQIA+ event, Pan Afrique.

The intersections between tribal identities, queer expression and normative beauty standards make Wandie M’s filmic work a must-see event during the 12 days of the festival.

Finding harmony in Luan Nel’s gallery space is another queer exploration titled Pride and Prejudice, which is the product of Toscaneena, the queer art duo of Tosca Marthinus and Neena Borrill.

They share a common camera while trying to make sense of their bodies and emotions which occupy liminal spaces of self-reflection, lesbian identity and societal perceptions.

Silos are consistently being dissolved as the HEAT programme also includes cabaret drag titled Cabaret: Freshly Squeezed which brings to the forefront the formidable history of drag in South Africa. The show is performed by the beloved Pichi Keane as they explore how their own genderqueer identity, which has been influenced by patriarchal barriers that seek to define their non-binary identity within a traditionally feminine body.

What is fascinating to observe, particularly with the examples given, is the layered subjugations that queer identity has faced historically.

Coming from a violent apartheid era where homosexuality was criminalised, the promulgation of our Constitution ensured the protection of queer identities, particularly as a human right.

However, especially in Cape Town, a more white and masculine queer expression was platformed, especially in the early 2000s, while People of Colour (POC) expressions only found homes in the peripheral communities.

Michaelis Galleries seeks to problematise this status quo through archival activation curated by Jade Nair as she revises this queer history and reminds us of the significant POC queer figures.

Kewpie, a prominent Coloured hairdresser and queer activist, showcases a beautifully resilient look at apartheid queer identities outside of whiteness. Through this exhibition, Nair creates a dialogue between Kewpie’s archive and the Sequins, Self and Struggle archive which chronicles the post-apartheid Cape Flats and the pageants of Miss Gay Western Cape and Spring Queen.

With a walkabout that will accompany this spectacular showing, we hope it brings these marginalised stories to a much greater audience as we appreciate the historical labour of our living archives, particularly our living queer archives.

The exploration of queer identity does not stop there, as the further merging of silos continues in the Cape Town theatre space that HEAT has tapped into.

Joining a repertoire of brilliant theatre practitioners, such as the well-known Rob van Vuuren through his works Namaste Bae and Dangled, we also witness the emergence of brilliant work that is being spearheaded by young and established Black theatre practitioners.

This merging of silos through a POC queer continual thread is highlighted in the production of Ganga Nyoko! Inzimba Nyoko! directed by Siphenathi Siqwayi and starring Siyamthanda Bangani and Sbuja Dywili.

Similar to Xhosa artist Wandie M’s showing at Nel Gallery, Ganga Nyoko! Inzimba Nyoko! seeks to uncover the complexities of African culture and queer identity as the show explores homophobia in rural Eastern Cape, set in the early 2000s.

HEAT An artwork by Charity Vilakazi, one of the artists showing at the Kalashnikovv gallery during the HEAT festival. (Photo: Supplied)

Historical works are particularly significant as theatre gives us the power of time travel, and thus a reflection not focused on normative time constraints, but rather a cyclical nature that warns us about how our present can be so similar to our past.

This could not be truer than in the production Tiro’s Time Loop Testimony, an energetic solo performance, written by Ayanda ka Nobakabona and directed by Mfundo Zono, honouring the life of apartheid activist Onkgopotse Tiro and the teachings of the Black Consciousness Movement.

Education is what ka Nobakabona and Zono offer as an antidote to oppression, a sentiment activist and intellectual Steve Biko embraced too.

Students and the youth seem to be the fire that propels this nation at any given time, from 1976 Soweto Uprising, to our contemporary context of #Feesmustfall, and gender-based violence activism sparked by the death of my own contemporary and fellow UCT colleague Uyinene Mrwetyana.

As a young Black woman, I do not only look onto this programme of HEAT as a delicious feast of the arts (which it truly is) but rather reflect on the microcosm that the festival creates for us to be able to test through artistic expression how we believe we ought to live in harmonious difference within this country.

As an avid scholar of our transitional period in the 1990s and transformative constitutionalism, the need for a clearly articulated post-apartheid consciousness is imperative if we seek to sustain this fire that has been continuously lit by the youth of this country at any given moment.

As HEAT keeps the embers going may we all come under the common name of the arts to warm our hands with the flames of dialogue, active listening and progressive redress and reparation. May this only be the beginning of what we define as our common ground for the future. DM

The text is funded by the Spier Arts Trust for the African Art Content platform. Baloyi is one of the curators of HEAT Winter Arts Festival.

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