a conversation in fragments and gestures
with Anaïs Nony, Bettina Malcomess & Kitso Lelliot and , facilitated Dani Bowler
Join us at the LAPA for ‘a conversation in fragments and gestures’ with French scholar and philosopher Anaïs Nony and Johannesburg-based artists Kitso Lelliot and Bettina Malcomess, facilitated by RGC curator Dani Bowler.
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For this special launch of her new book, Performative Images Images - A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France, Anaïs and Bettina will reflect on themes raised in the text, and their shared concerns around media, video and a racial regime of representation, as well as the rogue possibilities of art to envision alternative worlds, ways and imaginings. Intersecting their dialogue will be video snippets and traces drawn from Bettina’s filmic cycle, Sentimental Agents, recently screened in her solo exhibition at the Wits Art Museum (WAM).
Following culinary offerings by Chef Mantis of Breezeblock, a performative activation of Kitso Lelliot’s video installation, I was her and she was me and those we might become, will further extend this interdisciplinary conversation.
“It is a gesture to reclaim an agency to articulate the narratives that make us, through dialogue that is always in flux, so they might produce a shape we see fit for ourselves” - Kitso Lelliot (artist, scholar and winner of the 2024 Henrike Grohs Art Award).
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About the book:
Performative Images - A Philosophy of Video Art Technology in France (Amsterdam University Press, 2023) by Dr Anaïs Nony, explores how video-image technology impacts our psychic and social environments. We know media technology is dramatically shaping our political and epistemological landscape: this book foregrounds the emergence of performative video images as a key factor in the revaluation of culture and politics.
Bettina Malcomess, Sentimental Agents (2022-24)
Sentimental Agents is series of films embodying the entanglements of cinema within the nervous system of empire, an immersive information field of signals, light, sound and transmission. The films inhabit both personal and somatic memory and their inseparability from mediation. A registering of the re-inscription of historical representation on the celluloid substrate. Gaps, omissions, partial shadows, leakages of light.
Kitso Lelliot, I was her and she was me and those we might become (2016)
Visually the work I was her and she was me and those we might become takes on ideas of agency, reclamation and flux by articulating the concept of Sankofa (an Adinkra concept, loosely meaning one has to look back from where they came to see where they are going), through the use of tools and resources of the internet age while privileging Sankofa as a concept located in an African Adinkra knowledge system. I was her and she was me and those we might become runs in meditative silence for 20 minutes.