Anthea Moys VS The City of Grahamstown

Artist: Anthea Moys
Location: Grahamstown, South Africa
Year of completion: 2013
Researcher: Vaughn Sadie

Anthea Moys vs Grahamstown of a unique transformative approach to developing relational agency between the traditional paradigms of audience and performer. The project inserts itself into complex socio-economic situation, where a towns identity is continually define and reshaped by a migrant middleclass population of tertiary learners and festivalgoers. The assumption would be that neither is really concerned nor has a vested interest in a sustained and developing understanding of place. Rather their relationship to place is primarily defined by contemporary artistic culture and tertiary education, which in a South African context is mainly the realm of the privileged, with the poorer economic demographic for the most part excluded from the festival. Thus Moys attempts to draw some of these groups into a relational space through performance that creates new social contexts in which these identities can be reflexively explored in an embodied and agentive way.

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Anthea Moys was awarded a commission to develop a work for the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, as the inaugural winner for The Standard Bank Young Artist for Performance Art in 2013. She took this opportunity to bring her vocabulary of gaming, play, participation, public space and risk, together in a succinct and conceptually cohesive manner that explored Grahamstown both as a site and context. After several research trips, the artsist had developed a list of participating teams and groups. For a three month period leading up the festival she moved to the town to work more closely with the groups and to develop the one week long tournament.

Anthea Moys was awarded a commission to develop a work for the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, as the inaugural winner for The Standard Bank Young Artist for Performance Art in 2013. She took this opportunity to bring her vocabulary of gaming, play, participation, public space and risk, together in a succinct and conceptually cohesive manner that explored Grahamstown both as a site and context. After several research trips, the artsist had developed a list of participating teams and groups. For a three month period leading up the festival she moved to the town to work more closely with the groups and to develop the one week long tournament.

All copyright belongs to Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai University.

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