Through its Young Curators Incubator 2022 programme, in partnership with the History of Art Department at the Wits School of the Arts, Goethe-Institut presents
Practices of Self-Fashioning.
Curated by Nkgopoleng Moloi with a performative response by Tandile Mbatsha,
Practices of Self-Fashioning draws on theories of movement and queer theory to explore the relationship that queer-identifying people have with space and movement within the urban landscape. The nexus of the inquiry is the Kewpie Collection —the personal photographic archive of Kewpie, a hairdresser and performer who lived in Cape Town's District Six —housed at the GALA Queer Archive in Johannesburg. The project considers space and movement through the lens of “making oneself”— taking seriously tools, methods and practices wielded to allow oneself more freedom to move, to survive, to be. By engaging the archive
Practices of Self-Fashioning gestures at the larger project of excavating historical memory within a society characterized by contestations of cultural memory.
In the spirit of Kewpie who noted “[My father] ...wanted me to be his genuine normal son, whereas I am now to say his normal daughter” “Self Fashioning” is meditated upon as the creation of oneself but also the naming of oneself — deciding who one is and how one shows up in the world.
In its application,
Practices of Self-Fashioning functions as a direct critique and refusal to notions of “Renaissance Self Fashioning” where construction of the self is “according to a set of socially acceptable standards”. Rather, it is an invocation of Black Radical Feminist thinkers for whom the creation of the self considers creolized and hybrid perspectives (Wynter), is erotic (Lorde), is necessarily spiritual (Brooks) and is always in community (Morrison).
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