Tracey Rose THE TRACEY ROSE SHOW IN COLLABORATION WITH PERFORMA17 AND AFROGLOSSIA PRESENTS: THE GOOD SHIP JESUS VS THE BLACK STAR LINE HITCHING A RIDE WITH DIE ALIBAMA [WORKING TITLE] A Performa 17 Commission Thursday, Nov. 9 Friday, Nov. 10 Saturday, Nov. 11 2:00pm - 6:00pm Play 7:30pm - 8:30pm Show
Credits Curated by Adrienne Edwards Producer: Maaike Gouwenberg Technical Producer: Bob Wuss Stage Manager: Marija Misevičiūtė
Supported by the Ford Foundation, Fundação Sindika Dokolo, Liza Essers - Goodman Gallery, Wendy Fisher and the South African Pavilion Committee, and the Performa Commissioning Fund. With thanks to: RoseLee Goldberg, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Koyo Kouoh Acknowledgements
Work During the Apartheid 1970s Rose s parents bought a black and white Blaupunkt television, a luxury item at the time, which attracted throngs of neighbors who wanted to see it. As the decades shifted and color entered the frame, the Rose family maintained their Blaupunkt well into the 1980s. For Performa 17, Tracey Rose creates her first exhibition in New York City in a decade. The new interdisciplinary work takes the structure of a boxing match, a theme Rose has explored in a previous video self-portrait T.K.O. (2000), framing and using the choreography of the sport to convey combat and competition, as well as trust and affection, and ultimately exhaustion and a sense of the unexpected. The battle as epic journey is demarcated in the performance s title, which references the first British slave ship to the Americas on the one hand and the United Negro Improvement Association founder Marcus Garvey s shipping line on the other, pointing to the complexity of relations and intricacies of identity between those stolen or sent away from Africa and those who remained. For the commission, Rose is working with two collaborators to produce a narrative yet nonlinear script. Her collaborators are an East Coast black American man and a West Coast African man who work with and against the binaries suggested by their pairing. Because of the durational nature of the performance, the dialogue between these two characters and the script arising from it unfolds, as they evolve based on their distinct experiences informed by their continents, cultures, and perceptions. Experienced in the round, Rose creates a dynamic theatrical installation, comprising and centered around three mesh, free-standing screens in red, black, and green, as well as a central floating black
frame as reference to the old TV set and to the colors of the flags for UNIA, Pan African, black American nationalist, and Black Liberation movements. The original Blaupunkt television now fulfills a series of abstract staging tropes, the frames being a visual layering of what Mutabaruka called The Tell Lie Vision, and what Gil Scott Heron referred to when he explained why the revolution would not be televised. This abstraction has its aesthetic basis in two of the Performa 17 biennial s research areas, Dada and Afroglossia, as it relates to the absurdism of language and language as noise, a product of the colonial encounter with Africa, which profoundly influenced Dadaist art. The work moves beyond the literal realm of theatre and toward the abstract nature of a conceptual art history founded / birthed / originating in the so-called developing world. Work Rose also incorporates field recordings and video footage of a series of satellite performances enacted and captured around New York City, which are projected onto the screens. Immersed in various landscapes throughout the city, from Central Park, to Lower Manhattan, to Times Square, Rose s actions and performances are re-enactments of previous works as well as homages to key figures who have influenced her art and this commission, including Vito Acconci, Francis Alÿs, Coco Fusco, David Hammons, Allan Kaprow, Pope.L, Lorraine O Grady, and Adrian Piper. Over the course of several days, the performers continually develop and rehearse the script while on the set, the precision and detail of the content changing, evolving, and sometimes falling apart over time. Audience members are able to come and go as they please. The rehearsals crescendo into a daily culminating performance.
Artist Tracey Rose (b. 1974, Durban, South Africa,) is a seminal figure in postapartheid contemporary art who works in video, art, and performance. She is a graduate of the University of Witwatersrand and received her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Rose has had solo presentations worldwide, and has been featured in major international events such as the Venice Biennale (2001), São Paulo Biennial (2016), and documenta 14 (2017). Tracey Rose: Waiting for God, the artist s mid-career retrospective, was held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2011. She lives and works in Durban, South Africa.
Conceived and Executed by: Tracey Rose, Tito Valery, Alan Smithee, Christopher Wessels, Keitu Gwangwa, Chris Martin, Adrienne Edwards, The Black Lady Theatre, Maaike Gouwenberg, Audrey Rose, Sheila Lawler - Sheila s Creations, James Wilson, Lwandle Nzimande-Rose, Intikana Kekoeia, Lirael O Neil, M. Lamar, Jahmal B. Golden, Dan Gunn - Dan Gunn, Berlin Invisible Labor: Desmond Rose
Other Events This Week AFROGLOSSIA Film Program Sun, Nov. 12, 3:00pm - 10:00pm (selects by Yto Barrada, The Nest Collective, Tracey Rose) Mon, Nov. 13, 6:45pm - 10:00pm (selects by Julie Mehretu and Jason Moran) Anthology Film Archives, $11 / $9 Kris Lemsalu in collaboration with Kyp Malone Going, Going Sat, Nov. 11, 9:00pm Sun, Nov. 12, 7:00pm Harlem Parish, $15 / $10 Wangechi Mutu Banana Stroke Mon, Nov. 13, 7:00pm Tue, Nov. 14, 7:00pm The Metropolitan Museum of Art Free with Museum Admission Visit the Performa 17 Hub 427 Broadway, Soho New York, NY 10013 Noon 8pm daily Join the conversation PerformaNYC PerformaBiennial # PerformaNYC # Performa17 17.performa-arts.org 212 366 5700