Athi-Patra Ruga: Night of the Long Knives I, 2013

Deep in the pale grandeur of the Somerset House, a kaleidoscopic paradise of color unravels in the fantastical realm of Azania. Athi Patra Ruga’s Azania is a surreal utopia, containing a collection of extraordinary characters, heroes of a alternate reality, each as vibrant as the last. OF GODS, RAINBOWS AND OMISSIONS is Ruga’s first major solo UK exhibition, bringing together his diverse practice of performance, sculpture, film, photography, and his famously intricate handcrafted tapestry. Ruga immerses the viewer in his vibrant world of possibility, a world where borders are redrawn, social cohesion reigns, and exile is a place of contemplation, resolution, and ultimately freedom. The exhibition carries the viewer on a journey through the complex and all encompassing narratives of the elders and queens of an alternate post-apartheid history and future, and reimagines the heroes and monuments of South Africa.

Ruga is a South African artist whose practice explores notions of utopia, memory, and memorialization. Growing up in the time of post-apartheid optimism, Ruga shares with us a shimmering vision of a more humanistic future. Ruga explores the reimagination of monuments and how we interact with them, by memorializing the stories of black queer women in South Africa and incorporating them in roles of power and exaltation in his narrative history of Azania.

What is Azania? Next to the entrance of the galleries hangs the map of The Lands of Azania (2014-2094). With regions named “Sodom”, Palestine, and “Bubba Kush”, Ruga’s new nation is reflective of neglected politics and references biblical sin. Ruga’s cartography denounces Western constructs of space and time, and re-configures and re-names lands and oceans to collapse chronologies and emphasize the inevitable oppression that accompanies colonialism. Across the room the tapestry Azania In Waiting Circa 2008-2009, 2015 portrays the national crest of Azania, and hangs above the viewer in superiority. Ruga is a fan of crests as they support his exploration of monuments and the symbolism of glory and cohesion they represent.

The concept of Azaina takes origin with Pliny the Elder in the 1400s, who coined the term to describe the thriving civilization of the east coast of Africa. Azania is metaphoric for the liberation struggle of South Africa, and was the name appropriated in the 1965 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) as a proclamation of the ideal South Africa. Ruga states that by naming themselves Azanian, the people of South Africa were trying to shape their own identities, and in a time of great optimism saw the potential to build for themselves a safe space, or a utopia. He believes that in 1994 the post-apartheid climate of optimism in South Africa was the moment for the hopes of Azania to be realized, though to much dismay they were not. In his works Ruga contemplates how Azania lives on in the imagination of the people.

In creating a fictional nation, Ruga critically and humorously deconstructs the symbols of nation making. Ruga is interested in the creation of nationalism and employs many prominent tools used for the promotion of the nation. Traces of these tools can be spotted in almost every work, depicted through maps, royal leaders, a national crest, national animals and emblematic flowers. The beauty queen as an unsuspecting symbol of nationalism is a monument of sorts that Ruga employs in Miss Azania 2019, 2015. Here we meet the character uZuko, Azania’s pageant queen, as she poses in a cane throne and surrounded by cloaked figures, alluding to the higher systems of power often concealed in nation making. Ruga states that Miss Azania is also a comment on nationalism and how it plays out on the female body.

The concluding piece of this initial series is Convention… Procession… Elevation, 2013, a massive tapestry depicting several of the Future White Women of Azania avatars riding on the backs of saber tooth zebras, the national animal of Azania. In the foreground is The Versatile Queen Ivy, a character who is the current monarch in a long non-dynastic line of queens of Azania, an avatar Ruga describes as a mash up of Rihanna and Lady Godiva. The Versatile Queen Ivy is a character that bridges The Future White Women of Azania (2012 – 15) series with Queens in Exile (2015-17) series in the second room of the gallery.

Queens in Exile (2015-17) is a perpetuation of the Azanian fantasy, and follows the exile of The Versatile Queen Ivy. Ruga is fascinated by the concept of exile, and much of his interest originates in childhood exposure to the jailing and effective exile of Nelson Mandela within his own country. Mandela wrote much of his great works while imprisoned, inspiring Ruga’s idea for exile as a space where new ideas and new cultural objects are made. In this series Ruga explores the idea of exile as a political ban, but also as a metaphor for exclusion. The several tapestries in this series reference figures from South African history such as Sarah Baartman and the Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse, highlighting those who are often omitted from public memory,and commemorating queer and female histories.

The show also exhibits Ruga’s film Over The Rainbow, 2016-2017, featuring his performance of the characters The Versatile Queen Ivy and The Walking Wound. Exhibiting the film is an important anchor for viewing Ruga, as most of his works initiate as performance and are eternalized in photography. The final room of the gallery showcases The BEATification of Feral Benga (2017-), Ruga’s current series and a monumental homage to the Senegalese dancer and queer icon, contemplating her forgotten legacy in reference to the memory, identity, and legacy of African, male queer artists. Benga was a highly sought-after model of the Harlem Renaissance, and performed at the Folies Bergère in Paris in the 1920s. In this series she is resurrected and glorified by Ruga, in a procession of great respect throughout the lands New Azania. As an important, yet historically neglected symbol of the contribution of African male queer bodies to art, this series looks critically at the history of voyeuristic consumption of African performance art and its overlooked heritage.

The centerpiece of this room is the heroically sparkly sculpture At the End of the Rainbow We Look Back, 2018 depicting a popular pose of Feral Benga adopted into homoerotic postcards created for the Folies Bergère in 1930. The sculpture has three breasts and is completely embellished with hundreds of crystals and artificial flowers dotted with pearls. Nearby, in the tapestry In Apparition: Head of a Prophet, 2018 Ruga is depicted in Benga’s civilian clothing, establishing a visual connection and embodiment of himself within his revered ancestor. Ruga states that Benga is evocative of his self affirmed role as cultural pioneer, sharing the beautiful and authentic humanity found in South Africa with the world, through art and performance.

OF GODS, RAINBOWS, AND OMISSIONS by Athi Patra Ruga

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