Athi-Patra Ruga X Irma Stern Exhibition

WORDS Cheri Morris

Athi-Patra Ruga’s art comes into conversation with Irma Stern’s at the iconic painter’s former home in Irma & Athi… an intervention – an exhibition of contrary tendencies: admiration and disruption, colonial and queer, two-dimensional construction and complex destabilisation.

Since 2008, Ruga has been drawing on and reworking Stern’s most compelling paintings, including Watussi Queen, Swazi Youth and Zulu Woman. Now, the dialogue continues through an exhibition at the UCT Irma Stern Museum (ISM) in collaboration with WHATIFTHEWORLD where works of both artists are installed alongside each other, hoping to prompt a shift in the reading of both. 

Included are new site-responsive works that Ruga produced during a 3-month residency at the ISM, select loan works and iconic tapestries from the period 2009 – 2018 which reference paintings done by Stern during her 1943 and 1946 expeditions to central Africa. 

Attracted by Stern’s technical ability, lavish use of colour, her bold position as an Expressionist painter in the conservative South African art world of her time, and the atypical life she led; but acutely aware of her colonial viewpoint, Ruga casts a revisionist eye over her work to generate new interventions.

Principally, Ruga reassesses from a post-colonial stance, challenging and/or queering Stern’s romanticised and often two-dimensional constructions of Africa. For instance, he gives Stern’s nameless sitters – “Malay girl” and “Zulu Woman” – actual names and agency, disrupting the notion that their primary function was as a tableau for European contemplation and consumption. 

As part of the exhibition, Ruga will present a number of learner engagements and walkabouts – including an art-making workshop – that highlight the conversation he has been having with Stern and her art for over a decade. Booking is essential. 

The exhibition is currently open for public viewing and runs until 18 June 2022. For more information and dates for walkabouts and events, visit irmasternmuseum.co.za.

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