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Notes
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/rcin.
1 It was acquired by Tate Modern in 2012.
2 See Pile ou Face (1993), reproduced in Revue Noire 18 (1995), p. 27.
3 For reproductions, see Gaba et al. (Citation2001), pp. 147–150.
4 For images of the necklaces and design items, see Greenberg (Citation2013, pp. 79–82).
5 Jane Guyer reported the case of Zaire in the 1990s when “briques” of paper money were made and counted in kilos rather than numbers (Guyer, Citation1995a, p. 3).
6 Kukama is an artist and lecturer at the Wits University in Johannesburg. Besides her individual performance work, she is also involved in diverse collectives such as the Non-Non collective or the Center for Historical Reenactment (with Gabi Ngcobo and Kemang Wa Lehulere). She owns the Master of Arts in the Public Sphere (École cantonale d'art du Valais, Sierre, 2008) and was awarded Standard Bank Young Performance Artist in 2013.
7 The piece is known mainly through video footage due to its ephemeral quality. However, according to the artist, the work should be taken on its own (personal communication, January 4, 2015).
8 Although domestic abuse prevails, such aggressions also take place in public. Newspapers reported several incidences of discrimination and assaults on female commuters in the last years. As an example, see the article “Abusive, Sexist Taxi Drivers Criticised” of February 28, 2008 in the Independent Online (http://www.iol.co.za).
9 The intervention ended in an unforeseen accident. The rope of the swing let loose, whereby Kukama fell down in the marketplace and broke her leg. The people collecting the money did not pay any attention to her and instead ran off with the money.
10 She undertook similar operations in other performances such as her performance First Museum of European Culture at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, where she asked museum visitors to offer her an object “from their culture” (personal communication, January 4, 2015) in return for poems or songs performed by the artist. In another early performance, Red Suitcase, she sold individual items of her belongings stored in a red suitcase for an amount of money that in any case exceeded the actual value of the objects. In a more recent performance, Air-State Urgency, she walked the streets of Réunion with yoga mats, inviting passersby to lie down and choose a cloud to buy. This purchase would be, again, validated by a certificate.
11 Machona obtained his BA in 2009 Michaelis School of Arts Cape Town (fine art, new media), and his MA in 2013 at Rhodes University in Fine Art (sculpture). He is represented by the Goodman Gallery, where further information is available at http://www.goodman-gallery.com/artists/geraldmachona.
12 Continued poverty and related frustration affect predominantly the Black majority of South African nationals. It is a heavy legacy of White privilege and the related systematic denial of citizenship of the Black population since pre-apartheid times until just two decades ago. It has become a habit in public discourse, therefore, to emphasize that most xenophobic attacks are by Black nationals against Black foreigners. However, since the “Black on Black” discourse derives itself from the privileged White apartheid racial discourse and still has a strong tenacity, I prefer here to emphasize the economic condition rather than notions of race.
13 South Africa as an economic powerhouse directly abutting Zimbabwe has proved the most attractive destination of migrants, but Zimbabweans have also migrated to other neighboring states and to Europe and the United States. It is important to mention that the crisis in Zimbabwe is, like xenophobia in South Africa, directly related to failed postcolonial attempts at redressing the colonial history of White racism.
14 After the performance, Machona was detained and beaten (O'Toole, Citation2013), an event that only confirms the subversive effect of the performance and the mask's material, the devalued Zim dollars.
15 The Protea is an autochthonous flower in South Africa and particularly the Cape regions and therefore stands as a symbol for the nation as such.
16 See de Middel (Citation2012) and http://www.yinkashonibarembe.com.
17 No matter how far the “foreigner” figure comes from, Machona always is very aware of local and regional contexts when performing live. For instance, Machona made a performative intervention in St. Moritz (Switzerland) in his Vabvakure costume whereby the flower he carried was a local Edelweiss flower made from decommissioned Swiss, Portugese, Italian, Austrian, and other European currencies. He thus referred to the permanent negotiation of the relationships between Switzerland and the European Union, of which Switzerland is not a member, and the relationships between the EU member states.
18 One could even say that currency, as an artistically produced graphic design object, represents the most widely circulated artworks on the planet. I would like to thank Sylvester Ogbechie for drawing my attention to this.
19 See, for instance, also in My Piece of Gold (2009), a performance designed for the Scenographies Urbaines festival in Johannesburg where the artist slowly dropped red coins on the floor of shops that had declared themselves willing to play a remade sound piece containing a text from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
20 As an example, Machona's Friend Best Girl's Are Diamond's Blood: Bling Bling (2013) contains a Zimbabwean $10 billion note, a Ghanaian 500 cedi note, an old South African £1 note, an Angolan 50 escudos note, and a Mozambican 100 escudos note, all neatly folded into diamond shapes. It was presented at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg together with Y.O.L.O, In Profit We Trust? (2013) and A Sheet of Cotton Paper Crumpled Into a Ball (2013). Each work was locked into a briefcase. The visitors were invited to try to crack the code. The successful candidate would win the artwork as a gift.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Fiona Siegenthaler
Fiona Siegenthaler ([email protected]) is a postdoc senior lecturer at the Chair of Social Anthropology, University of Basel, and a research associate at the Center for Visual Identities, Art, and Design, University of Johannesburg. She is the coordinator and a co-researcher of the research project Art/Articulation: Art and the Formation of Social Space in African Cities (2015–2018; project lead Prof. Dr. Till Förster) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In this framework, she continues her postdoctoral research in Kampala (Uganda).
The author would like to thank Jordan A. Fenton for his helpful comments and suggestions on the first draft of this article.