The Live Art Arcade, a nomadic exhibition started by Makhanda’s Gavin Krastin, has published its first book.
Portals into Praxis: Artists’ Reflections on the Live Art Arcade 2018-2022 was released in September and a free version e-book is available to the public.
The 130-page colourful spread includes essays from 12 collaborators on experimental body-based conceptual work — some performers dressed in red robes and bathed the feet of their audience with long black hair, or wrote Afrikaans poetry on bathroom walls, others danced in pointe shoes on a bed of rocks.
It took two years to finish.
Evaan Ferreira, 28, from Makhanda, documented iterations of the exhibition while completing his studies in the Fine Arts department at Rhodes University.
Ferreira said: “It’s very exciting to see two years of work, a lot of editing, a lot of late nights — I’m very proud of it.
“It’s a physical manifestation of this idea of collaboration; the design of the book we have looked at giving each writer and piece its own space, using fonts or format the writer used as an idea of freedom or self-identifying through text.
“I think it’s very seldom you get such an opportunity to read your own words [in print] and it’s exciting to see that it’s produced by people from the Eastern Cape.”
Live Art Arcade was started by Krastin, an educator, performance artist, curator and the Standard Bank Young Artist for Performance Art in 2021, as a space for young SA artists to showcase their work in a professional exhibition.
The exhibition has migrated to various venues — the Theatre Arts in Cape Town in 2018, the Black Power Station in Makhanda during the National Arts Festival (NAF) in 2019 and Makhanda’s Monument building in 2023, the Hexagon Theatre in Pietermaritzburg and went virtual when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
Krastin said: “Arcade started first as a platform to exhibit live art, and then moved into the production, curation execution and disseminating of live art.
“The fourth layer is now publication. It’s been unreal to see how its grown and really trust the process. This was just an idea we had and stuck with. I feel very proud and grateful for how it has been growing and developing.”
Arcade2024 formed part of the Institute for Creative Art’s (ICA) biennial Live Art Festival in Cape Town last week.
“Because we have this adaptive model, we understand we are situated in such extremity and flux and unknowns,” Krastin said.
“Some years we have decent funding, some years next-to-no funding. And so we work and scale accordingly.”
The book was free so that students could access it as a reference for their academic work, Krastin explained.
“Over the next five years, I would really like to keep doing the same, but also share the work internationally, and I would love a residency aspect where artists get together for a week or two and create over that time, culminating in an exhibition.”
A cornerstone is collaboration and it has been supported by the National Arts Council of SA, the Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme and the department of sports, arts & culture.
“We are so grateful for all the partnerships we have gained along the way, whether it’s NAF or the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) or universities — we don’t own or have a space,” Krastin said.
“It’s not like we are a company of artists; everything is transient and so we work with these institutes to ground us and, in turn, challenge the institutes.”
Alan Parker, Krastin’s husband and creative partner, worked as a co-editor on the book.
In the forward, Parker wrote: “In conceptualising this book project, we wanted to ensure that despite its material, tangible form, it would still be able to encapsulate the quintessential proponents of the LAA — multiplicity, simultaneity and collective world-making — and become a stable enduring place for emerging and early-career artists, working in the margins of art-making practices, to share their work with each other and to connect with other communities.”
The book includes contributions from Lesego Chauke, Andi Colombo, Julia de Rosenwerth, Evaan Ferreira, Axl Forder, Gavin Krastin, Lungile Lallie, Naledi Majola, Nomcebisi Moyikwa, Alan Parker, Tazmé Pillay, Kanya Viljoen and Louise Westerhout.
To download a free copy of Portals into Praxis: Artists’ Reflections on the Live Art Arcade 2018-2022, go to www.liveartarcade.co.za
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