"Making work is a documentation of a journey..." 1
Tracey Rose grew up in the context of South Africa's Apartheid during the most gruelling years of the regime. Her childhood experience and education in Johannesburg as a 'coloured person' (someone of mixed races) in this context of systemic oppression and violence had a profound influence on her artistic exploration. Since 1995, she has been creating as a performance and video installation artist works that make powerful statements about race, gender, politics and self-representation. Through her work, she translates a collective trauma into her personal aesthetic, investigating issues of identity, race, gender and exploring the politics of self-representation. She has given them an autobiographical aspect, mapping her experience and that of her community during Apartheid. Nevertheless, with wit and a critical eye, through her central aesthetic strategy, she is transgressing her predicament in order to establish herself as an agent of meaning.
In most of Tracey Rose's early work, she investigated the questions of gender and racial classification, through the inscription of her own body and body hair. Hair, whether it was displayed, shaved or knotted, has been a constant in her work and consequently a metaphor for racial classification. Displayed in a glass container as a video in 'Roots' (1995) and accompanied by a soundtrack of 'coloured' people's experience during Apartheid. Shaved in 'Ongetiteld/Untitled' (1997), a video installation of herself naked, shaving off her body hair with electric clippers. Explaining this act, Rose describes it as being 'about both de-masculating and de-feminising my body, shaving off the masculine and feminine hair. This kind of de-sexualization carries with it a certain kind of violence. The piece is about making myself unattractive and unappealing.' The words penance and flagellation best characterize this work. Finally, in 'Span II' (1997), the hair was knotted in a public performance at the second Johannesburg Biennale. In this performance, Rose sat naked with shaved head on a tv showing a close-up image of a reclining nude. Seating head bent she occupied herself with knotting her own shaven hair. About this work, she comments that its purpose is a deliberate 'cleansing act, a coming out. The knotting not only invokes the rosary beads of my childhood, but also the working with one's hands, and the meaning of this handiwork as a form of empowerment.'
Moving on to another stage of her career, last year, in a work entitled 'TKO' (2000), Rose portrays herself as a moaning boxer relentlessly throwing blows at a punching bag. "Monet's water lilies struck me - that commitment to the surface - my understanding of boxing was that it was an art, a passion, like dancing, and the intention was that each punch would be a mark, a gesture, building up to something," she explained about the process. The result is a video installation made up of a large transparent screen placed diagonally in the space, on which layered images - two translucent and one opaque - are projected. The video shows blurred, undefined white shapes moving backward and forward, in and out of the screen, forcing viewers to continuously displace themselves in an effort to follow the action and to accompany the boxer in her exhausting combat.
Recently, at the Venice Biennale's main exhibition 'A Plateau of Humankind', Tracey Rose exhibited a new video work, 'Ciao Bella'. In this work she presents 13 portraits of women. Making a reference to the Last Supper, she translates its formal sense by defying the original and classical meaning. By staging the roles of historical women characters that have definite social and iconical denotations, Rose's proposed theatre is an invitation to refocuse our gaze to new interpretations. Rose has commented that theatre has always been an integral socially accepted domain - a place where questions can be posed and new roles adopted, especially when those possibilities do not readily exist in the immediacy of one's lived environment.
1. Tracey Rose's statement in an interview given to 'Artthrob'.
– Dominique Fontaine
|
Commissioned by World Wide Video Festival 2001, with the support of hivos Culture Fund
Tracey Rose ° 1974 Durban, South Africa
Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa
|
|
2 0 0 1 
