’’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 visual and performing artists who explore new forms, break boundaries, flout aesthetic conventions, tackle controversy, confront audiences and experiment with perceptions’’, explains ICA Live Art festival organizers.
After two years in a pandemic, people are both anxious and excited about being outside again. The way we interact with one another and our environments has changed completely, this year’s festival serves to highlight this. 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.
The festival consists of 38 productions featuring artists and performers from South Africa and beyond. The festival also includes a discourse where conversations with artists, including a presentation by Julie Peghini from Paris 8 University and Bénédicte Alliot, director general of the Cité internationale des arts on Performative Utopias.
The Kirstenbosch programme explores different aspects of ecology and history, this will take place on Saturday 2 April and Sunday 3 April. South African-Ugandan artist and textile designer Sibablwe Ndlwana will demonstrate how to make a botanical community cloth with plant dyes. Lastly, a group of artists, scientists, healers, designers and anthropologists will host a workshop on how to interact with, and perhaps “talk to”, plants.
On Sunday 3 April 2022, Cape Town-based architect and artist Ilze Wolff will reflect on garden and land politics; American artist Chanelle Adams will take participants on a “ghost tour” of the camphor trees planted at Kirstenbosch by Cecil John Rhodes; and Swiss artist Daniela Müller will reflect on human-plant-animal relationships through the garden mole, often considered a problem animal.
Tickets for the festival are free but limited so booking is essential. See the full programme here.
For tickets, visit www.quicket.co.za
