FEATURES
LERATO SHADI'S PERFORMANCES ARE PROCLAMATIONS SENT TO THE UNIVERSE. BY SEAN O'TOOLE
A flashback. It is a cold August night at the Bag Factory Studios
in Fordsburg. Her body swathed in white sheets, her arms outstretched
in a Christ-like pose, her feet balanced on a plinth jutting out from
a wall high above viewers' heads: Lerato Shadi. The young
Johannesburg artist looks like a chrysalis, about to be born; more
than this, she looks exhausted, her eyes distant, her consciousnesses
elsewhere.
Months later, seated at a coffee table in the tiny suburban
enclave of Richmond, Shadi is her usual self again: ebullient,
slightly shy, uncompromisingly honest.
"I wish I had some intellectual way of explaining it," she
states when I ask about a series of suggestively erotic, but
essentially abstract photographs she exhibited last year at Gordart
Gallery. "The reason I made those works is because I do have what
is seen to be a good body." Of course, there is more to this work
than her initial explanation suggests. Titled African Landscape
(2006), Shadi's monochromatic photographs attempt to say things
about looking, and how the female form is reduced to "a landscape",
also how the body is staked and claimed, even marked through this
looking.
But this is formative work, the nub of our conversation dealing
with Shadi's interest in performance. As it turns out, her Bag
Factory ritual, which formed part of a one-night festival of
performance, was not her first foray into live action. While at Wits
Tech, she barricaded the Doornfontein library of the old Wits Tech
with books and chevron tape. The basis for the three-hour
intervention was a disagreement Shadi had with the learning
institution's administration, but its deeper impetus – one that
cuts through all her performance work – has to do with slowing
things up, not only for herself but for her audience too. She uses
the word meditation.
"If you look at the Bag Factory work, that was quite
meditative," she says, visibly awkward about having to voice a
defined assertion about her youthful practice. "I think most of my
works are very selfish, because first and foremost they have to do
with me, with my need to just go through that."
Shadi mentions her performance Hema (or Six hours of out-breath
captured in 792 balloons). Shown as a video projection in Michael
Stevenson's Side Gallery, the work involved Shadi inflating 792
balloons while seated on top of a lift in a flash Cape Town
advertising office. The work traces its origins back to a live
performance Shadi did at Anthea Moys and Juliana Smith's Kazoo
evening of live performances at Johannesburg's Premises Gallery in
2006. Where the first version of this performance occupied two hours
of her time, the version filmed in Cape Town lasted three times as
long.
Lerato Shadi photographed in Richmond, Johannesburg, January 2008 Photo Wandile Maseko
"Originally it was meant for an office space but Kazoo was a
good opportunity to try it out and experiment," says Shadi. "After
that I knew I wanted to do it for longer … because I wanted to
meditate more. I always think of my work as a proclamation or wish
sent to the universe."
How did her jaw muscles feel afterwards? "They were sore, but I
was happy. It was first and foremost about me wanting to breath and
meditate."
About Lerato Shadi: Born and raised in Mafikeng, Shadi came to
Johannesburg to study hospitality management, eventually switching to
fine art. She completed her B-tech (Honours) in Fine Art at the
University of Johannesburg in 2006. In November 2007 she presented
her first solo exhibition at Michael Stevenson's Side Gallery. She
has shown on several group exhibitions in Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Lerato Shadi is Art South Africa's third Bright Young Thing for 2008
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