Notes

The present lot is accompanied by a WHATIFTHEWORLD certificate of authenticity.

The costumed figure in this photograph speaks directly to Athi-Patra Ruga’s biography, in particular his love for fashion and artistic penchant for elaborate scenography and camp theatrics. Born in Umtata but raised in East London, Ruga moved to Johannesburg in 2002 to study fashion at the Gordon Flack-Davidson Academy of Design. He soon encountered the work of transgressive performance artists Steven Cohen and Sharon Bone, and also befriended artist Tracey Rose, whom he would later assist. The balloon-clad figure in this photo was conceived for a live performance at the 2010 Toffie Festival in Argentina. Ruga subsequently staged appearances in Holland and Italy, as well as in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Grahamstown. Over time his drag-influenced character acquired a mythical context: she is a monarch from a matriarchal dynasty ruling Azania, a fictional utopia once championed by anti-apartheid activists. Ruga has likened his Azania to Walter Battiss’s Fook Island: ‘I think one should always have the idea of a better place.’¹

—Sean O’Toole

Athi-Patra Ruga is one of the few artists working in South Africa today whose work has adopted the trope of myth as a contemporary response to the post-Apartheid era. Ruga creates alternative identities and uses these avatars to parody and critique the existing political and social status quo. Ruga’s artistic approach of creating myths and alternate realities is in some way an attempt to view the traumas of the last 200 years of colonial history
from a place of detachment – at a farsighted distance where wounds can be contemplated outside of personalized grief and subjective defensiveness.

The philosophical allure and allegorical value of utopia has been central to Ruga’s practice. His construction of a mythical universe populated by characters that he has created and depicted in his work has allowed Ruga to create an interesting space of self-reflexivity in which political, cultural, and social systems can be critiqued and parodied. Ruga has used his utopia as a lens to process the fraught history of a colonial past, to critique the present and propose a possible humanist vision for the future.¹

^1. Sean O’Toole, interview with artist, 21 October 2013.

Provenance

WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, 2014.

Property of Collectors.

Exhibited

WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, The Future White Women of Azania Saga, 27 November 2013 to 1 January 2014.

Literature

Athi-Patra Ruga (2014) Athi-Patra Ruga: F.W.W.O.A SAGA, Cape Town: WHATIFTHEWORLD, illustrated in colour, unpaginated.