The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) launches Africa’s eminent performance art platform, the International LIVE ART Festival this spring from 1 to 16 September. Returning to Cape Town for its fourth anniversary, the ICA Live Art Festival 2018 showcases a gathering of some of the most influential visual and performance artists from South Africa as well as from around the world. Creating spaces for new transgressive work in a non-commercial environment, these innovative works will also be free of charge to all. 

The programme delivers a rare selection of cutting edge works presented together in one programme navigating the various publics to the corners of their comfort zones, offering audiences an immersive experience to connect with relevant issues
confronting society.  

The free and public nature of the ICA Live Art Festival is vested in a commitment to the value of contemporary live art as a means of facilitating encounters that encourage people to think and feel about a range of important issues in new and different ways.

With up to 40 different presentations, the Festival this year will be presented on four platforms. The first, entitled Trajectories, will focus on the development and histories of live art, comprising productions that emerge from different lineages. Notably, a number of artists connect contemporary live art with classical African tradition, reminding us that the presence of live art on the African continent long predates the coinage of the term in the West.

In The Spotlight (a small selection of the works to be presented)

PLATFORM ONE – Trajectories

Albert Ibokwe Khoza & Robyn Orlin

And so you see…our honourable blue sky andever enduring sun…canonly be consumed slice by slice

Sikhumbuzo Makandula & Mthwakazi

Ingoma ka
Tiyo Soga

Bongani
Madondo

Zulu: Credo Mutwa’s Fantasia in Praxis

Donna Kukama

We the Not-Not People! -Things done, not told. Inscribed, not written.

John Nankin

Death and Utopia (aka The Young Pioneers)

PLATFORM TWO – Actions and Activism

Nastio Mosquito

Respectable Thief

Nelisiwe Xaba

Bang Bang Wo

Sello Pesa

Bag Beatings

Mamela Nyamza

Black Privilege

PLATFORM THREE  – In the Time of the Anthropocene

Cornelia Knoll

Untangling Colonial Ecologies

Uriel Orlow

Theatrum Botanicum

PLATFORM FOUR – Intimacies and Biography.

Laila Soliman, Stacy Hardy, Neo Muyanga & Nancy Mounir

Museum of Lungs

FAKA

The Factory

Athi-Patra Ruga

Things We Lost in the Rainbow

Sue Williamson

One Hundred and Nineteen Deeds of Sale

ICA Director and Curator of the Festival, Jay Pather said“This interdisciplinary festival is designed to extend and in some respects challenge the public’s experience of live art and at the same time make accessible the work of visual and performing artists who explore new forms, break boundaries, flout aesthetic conventions, tackle controversy, confront audiences and experiment with perceptions.“

LIVE ART performances will tour across public venues of the Mother City from the University of Cape Town’s Little Theatre Precinct, to Iziko National Galleries, Zeitz MOCAA, and various spaces in the city centre, such as the Cape Town Station, the Company’s Garden, the Planetarium and the Castle of Good  Hope. 

For programme details visit www.ica.uct.ac.za