The fourth event in this year’s Tuesday@Secession series the artist Bronwyn Lace will conduct a performative lecture based around themes of memory and colonial histories.

Bronwyn Lace

GRAPES DIVINE

Following the performance, Lace will show a selection of works on film by other South African artists and performers that were made collectively and collaboratively at The Centre for the Less Good Idea (the organisation that Lace co-founded with William Kentridge), which will in turn lead into a discussion between Lace and Secession curator Damian Lentini. 

Through her contribution, Lace is keen to share the ways in which free spirited, open and collective responses to images through myriad sounds, gestures, and materials can become tools for layering, agitating, rescripting and expanding upon the people, places, landscapes, rituals and knowledge systems represented in the images and films. In engaging the archive in an active, collective, and interdisciplinary manner, new possibilities and tactics are able to emerge. Collapsing and unfolding time through performance becomes a means of destabilising the authority of an image. De-objectifying and re-humanising those present in the image. The act of embracing the incidental and the fragmentary becomes a way of working around the gaps and mistranslations in the historical narratives that accompany these images, pursuing instead the emergent material traces surfaced through the body, the voice, the ensemble. The introduction of language – be it linguistic, musical, or visual – can allow one to give a voice to a silenced image, while the use of physical performance and gesture can challenge, animate and expand upon a frozen or recreated moment.