I Make Art (2011-2020)

It started off as a reaction to my silencing.

I had written an opinion piece in a South African art magazine critiquing the lack of racial transformation in the visual arts field in South Africa. Practically overnight I went from up-and-coming artist to art world pariah, non-existent as the White monied habitus closed ranks. What has I expected? That they would sing my praises when I opened my mouth? Over the next two years I produced What I look like, What I feel like in which I presented comparative images which I tried to communicate the contradictions of a public-private personae: my own feelings of feeling victimised, hurt and angry set against public perceptions of me as a radical, an activist, an angry black woman – none of these meant in a positive way.

Masquerade, autobiography and the use of my body dressed up in caricatures of Self and Other became the vehicle of which I reclaimed my voice, my position, the right to speak against the art industry and academia, which showed in a variety of ways, the long arm of power.

[PERFORMANCE. PAUSE. BREATHE. SILENCE]

I Make Art (2020)

Digital video projection on wall; 20 digital videos played on TVs; 10m x 1,6m painting; 10m x 1.6m wall mural

3-D Rendering and Videographics: Katty Vandenberghe

I Make Art – A Declarative Statement (2020)

It started off as a reaction to my silencing.

An international collaborative project, the German curator leaving Johannesburg telling me that I didn’t need to show my new performative video in Berlin because “we’ve already seen all that.”

They’d already seen all of that.

Already seen all of that?

Feeling that my voice and language were deemed insufficient, I restaged John Baldessari’s iconic I Am Making Art (1976) into a declarative statement:

I MAKE CONTEMPORARY ART

Using the language of acknowledged canonised works, my repetition became a marker of difference, of otherness, a s-t-r-a-i-n-e-d signifier as I tried to mimic the ephemerality of Baldessari’s nonchalant gestures. My body refused to mimic the authority of whiteness, of maleness and I was, yet again, an Other on the margins attempting to force my way into the Western art centre, like those feminists, those Arabs, those Africans, those performers, those public artists, those new media people. Mimicry became mockery in the space of almost-but-not-quite, almost-but-not-white, almost-but-not-right. The slippage of the ‘not’ became a space of play, of humour, of popular culture spoofing, of the carnivaleque, the first fart joke, the space of Homi D. Clown, of transgression.

I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art. I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art. I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art, I make art.

Repetition re-authorises but not quite. It slides, it slips, it tries to hide and it exposes. Spot the difference.

Repetition renews.

Repetition rejuvenates.

Repetition regenerates.

Repetition disrupts.

Repetition destabilises and threatens.

Repetition avenges.

“What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?” (Jean Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, 1948)

[PERFORMATIVE PAUSE. BREATHE. SILENCE]

Sharlene Khan
I Make Art, 2020