Nonperformance as a tactic: Navigating harm & repair in contemporary South African Performance
The talk will introduce some examples from Ally's current book project, Harm & repair in contemporary South African performance: Resisting injustice.
She will share ideas from one chapter on performance and racial capitalism to explore the tactics of performative stillness, nonperformance or 'strike'. The talk introduces artist Mary Sibande's Sophie series and reads that against the shipping crate that returned Sarah Baartman's remains to South Africa and the example of the Im4TheArts chair Sibongile Mngoma and her collective's occupation of the National Arts Council.
The section considers how artists question forms legibility that still or inactive bodies on display have, which Fred Moten has called 'nonperformance'. That is, a form of ambiguous presence that is not predicated on ‘liveness’ (which, after all, insists on a relation of motion, progress, movement and witnessing). In this mode, he says that ‘it is in and as nonperformance, where both the thing and its activity fade from the (mis)understanding into differential, inseparable [B]lackness’ (2018: 241). Rather than simply being not movement, nonperformance is a conscious tactic that produces meaning, even if that meaning is not yet manifest, but potential. As such, deploying nonperformance as a mode of resistance is one of the tactics artists use as they navigate harm and repair.
Aylwyn Walsh is Professor of Performance and Social Change at the University of Leeds, based in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries. She is a scholar-artist-activist and has worked in arts in criminal justice, arts and mental health, and abolitionist organising as well as in community settings in South Africa, Greece and the UK. Books include Prison Cultures: Performance, Resistance, Desire (Intellect, 2019); the co-edited Remapping Crisis: A Guide to Athens (Zer0 Books, 2014). She has published across a range of journals including Performance Research, RIDE, Liminalities, Performance Paradigm, Futures Journal amongst others.
Photo credit: Sophie/Elsie Mary Sibande, 2013
