Athi-Patra Ruga

Ruga explores the notions of utopia and dystopia of a post apartheid South Africa. Working in printmaking, textiles, fashion, performance, and video, his work explores the body in relation to sensuality, culture, and ideology, often creating cultural hybrids. Themes such as sexuality, HIV/AIDS, African culture, and the place of queerness within post-apartheid South Africa also permeate his work. Ruga uses queerness to delineate appropriate symbols of apartheid’s power structure of strict binaries of gender and race and make them more ambiguous. To engage with his work the audiences need to be open, to experience and share. Ruga's performance pieces often raising questions about the public spaces being engaged with, exploring diverse levels of perceptions and reactions of the population encountered. Using fashion and body language in relation to the urban spaces provide a clash between legal and individual freedoms and social norms. Engaging in behaviors that lack a sense of “normalcy” or “common sense” using parameters such as gender, ways of moving, dress and behavior, race and ethnicity in a hetero normative society.

FWWoA consists of several works, including performance, tapestry, sculpture, video, and photography creating a saga. FWWoA is an allegory of post apartheid nationalism, where Ruga then becomes the “elder” or historian. Creating this constellationary history, drawing references from pre Xhosa history and post apartheid South Africa, tells the history of the non-dynastic line of queens who rule the lands of Azania. Ruga’s works are attentive to the demands for justice for his ancestors and the need for radical transformation in the future, to shatter the ideologies of “rainbowism”. By using Azania as the framework for a critical history of South Africa, FWWoA reveals the silencing of black voices that extends back to the first moments of colonial contact, while also addressing the impossible and unrealized ideologies of forgiveness, reconciliation and redemption practiced in a post apartheid South African.

Azania’s allegorical capacity derives from its status as a symbol of a liberated South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle. However, the term has a specific history that complicates such dreams. The place name ‘Azania’ first appears in The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (40 AD) to refer to the lands of southern and eastern Africa. By designating the lands of Africa as ‘Azania,’ Ruga understands the label as one example in a long history of constructing Africa as uninhabited until European colonial contact.

Ruga’s tapestries in the FWWoA saga chronicles allegorical depictions of queens, maps, and other iconography of Azania. The struggles of the non-dynastic line of queens depicting signifiers of an Azanian national identity: national seal, crest, flower, maps, while also including Ruga’s long standing interest in popular culture. Taking inspirations from Gustave Eiffel’s ‘Statue of Liberty’ or Eugene Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People', Ruga brings about the idea of objectifying the woman's body as the conflict, but in his own work creates them as powerful but passive. In his work ‘The Lands of Azania’, Ruga reworks the map of Eastern Africa. Insetting a national animal, the saber-tooth zebra, the Azanian flag, and giving several countries new names. Throughout the geography of Azania he further explores the overlaps of exile and diaspora in the African and Jewish communities.

Ilulwane was a synchronized-swimming performance inspired by Alvin Baltrop’s 1970s and 80s photographs, reflecting on the passage of time in both New York and in the artist’s own Xhosa culture. Ilulwane was performed in Cape Town at the Long Street Baths during the Infecting the City Public Arts Festival in 2012

Performance Obscura, is a performance piece apart of the saga ‘ The Future White Women of Azania’ (FWWoA, 2010–2016) in which an obscured figure in bright pink tights and red stiletto heels covered from the waist up in brightly colored balloons confronts everyday life. Ruga is confronting public memory, national identity, and history in post aparthied South Africa, while combining traditions like a funeral march and  hybrid and festive Kaapse Klopse minstrel parade in Cape Town. The balloons representing lightness, flotation and childhood joy, while also referencing Desmond Tutu’s metaphor of rainbow nation. The performers actions of bursting the balloons and leaving dye on it undermines the authoritative powers of the statues there by disestablishing the authority of stone. Ruga terms these characters as “avatars” and serves an apotropaic function by shielding the performer from trauma and empowering them.

This series of photographs are centered around Johannesburg Central Police Station, called John Vorster Square during apartheid, associated with interrogations, torture, and killing of political prisoners before 1994. Ruga dressed his subject in women's clothing along with a black helmet and long-haired wig. The extravagant garments and dramatic and glamorous poses evoke traditional fashion photography, contrasting with the racist crimes once committed in the building. Among other motivations to produce this work, the artist mentioned the xenophobic attacks that took place in May 2008 (called 5/11 in the vernacular) in townships all over South Africa as well as in the inner city of Johannesburg.

Athi-Patra Ruga (born in 1984) is a South African artist who uses performance, photography, video, textiles, and printmaking to explore notions of utopia and dystopia, material and memory. His work explores the body in relation to sensuality, culture, and ideology, often creating cultural hybrids. Themes such as sexuality, HIV/AIDS, African culture, and the place of queerness within post-apartheid South Africa also permeate his work.

Athi-Patra Ruga was born on the 9th of March 1984 in Umtata in Eastern Cape, South Africa. He studied fashion history and design at the Gordon Flack Davison Design Academy in Johannesburg Ruga was recently included in the Phaidon book Younger Than Jesus, a directory of over 500 of the world’s best artists under the age of 33. In 2014 he presented in collaboration with Zanele Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo, facilitated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at Design Indaba Conference at Cape Town. Ruga has an exhibition done recently in London At 1–54 at London’s Somerset House, Of Gods, Rainbows and Omissions, also includes a collaboration of cohesive ideas for the exhibition with other South African Artists Emma Willemse, Faith47, and Thania Petersen.  Ruga's work has been purchased by numerous public and private collections, including the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa permanent collection, Iziko South African National Gallery, Museion – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Bolzano Italy, and the CAAC – Pigozzi Collection.