Anthea Moys vs The World — Keen to take on a South African performance artist in the UK?

With a rapidly rising international reputation, Moys has shown her work in Sweden, Switzerland, London, Australia, Miami, New York and Berlin. Winner of the inaugural Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art for 2013, her latest exhibition reflects on her performance series Anthea Moys vs The City of Grahamstown and Anthea Moys vs The City of Geneva, in which, hugely outnumbered and out-skilled, she challenged local populations to various tasks.

She is presently working in the UK on a project with Friction Arts as part of the Afrovibes Festival. As part of the festival programme, Friction Arts are hosting a Township Cafe at mac birmingham and also The Drum, and have invited Anthea to collaborate.

Moys, whose work explores connections between play, games, rule making and performance, will create public realm intervention artworks that will occur at within Afrovibes venues and out in communities during the festival.

Friction Co-Director Sandra Hall said:

“Birmingham may not have a large South African community, but people from many other African diasporas live across the city. We want the Township Cafés to represent the experience of Africans living in Birmingham today.

“The cafés are spaces that bear the many different stories of the people we’ve met, and tell those stories to visitors. We are also facilitating live links with people in South Africa at the larger mac birmingham cafe, allowing open conversations with our two countries.”

“Five years after we first worked together in Johannesburg, we’re very excited to be creating with Anthea in our home city of Birmingham. She’s a rising star of the international art scene and her work is always exciting and surprising.”

We caught up with Moys ahead of the Festival to get her views:

Your current collaboration with artists Sandra Hall and Lee Griffiths in their hometown of Birmingham isn’t the first time you’ve worked together, is it?

We met in JHB for the first time [back in 2009] when we worked on the 1Square Mile project together, with theatre maker and director Kyla Davis. We worked collaboratively on approximately four different projects in the centre of JHB – all in the one square mile proximity from Johannesburg Art Gallery.

And now you’re in Birmingham working together again… can you say a bit about the work that you’re developing?

Not much yet as it is still in its developmental stage! But can tell you that there will be a high tech’ tin can phone network to watch out for and come and play with; that we will hopefully be playing some South African games in the space at [arts centre] MAC Birmingham; that there will be bread-making and coffee making; that there will be dancing and storytelling, listening and speaking. All of this will be taking place at the MAC in Cannon Hill Park.

You spent three months training for 2013’s Anthea Moys vs Grahamstown (as part of the National Arts Festival), in which you took on six challenges: karate, football, ballroom dancing, choral singing, battle re-enactment and chess. Have you used any of those skills since?

Nope, I unfortunately haven’t. What I have learnt about myself is that I love learning new things and this idea of the process of learning itself as an activity to master rather than the skill itself is really interesting to me. So the mastering of the learning exchange between myself and the amazing people I work with is what I really really love — this I will continue to do until I die.

Engagement is at the core of your work — from your own engagement with the initial idea and process, to people you’re working with and learning from, to the audience. Do you ever continue that engagement after the activity? 

I have kept in touch with my karate sensei in Grahamstown and we have become very close friends. I always let everyone who has been in the project know what I am up to, how the project has progressed, any write ups and sharing of documentation etc. Whenever I go to Grahamstown I try and make a point to see people I have worked with there.

Does recording the long process and documenting live work present a significant challenge for you?

Not really a challenge. I do love my GoPro [camera]! And if there is budget for it, then we are A for Away! I have also been really blessed with the most incredible photographers. Wonderful, extremely talented people.

Taking the MAPS Master of Arts in the Public Sphere course in Sierre, Switzerland, in 2005, seems to have been something of a turning point in the development of your practice — is there a noticeable difference between pre and post Swiss work?

Definitely. I think I really ‘let go’ in Switzerland. This period was my first real exposure to performance/ live art practice and I really started playing and experimenting here. I came back to create 94.7 cycle Challenge (2006) and Boxing Games (2007) which jetted me off into further journeys into participatory performance and the like.

You’re often described simply as a ‘performance artist’ (which does seem quite a limiting label); how do you describe yourself and your work?

It IS a limiting label! I must admit I do find the label — performance artist — very difficult and I don’t think it is really performance art actually… I am still trying to work out a specific title or label. I often say quite simply that I am an artist who works with performance or live art practices. Do you have any suggestions? [smiles]

You presently have an exhibition at Ithuba Art Gallery in Braamfontein, Johannesburg entitled Winning (until 25 Oct 2014).

The exhibition includes documentation from the Anthea Moys vs Grahamstown and Geneva projects – photographs, a very moving video work, stories, texts and various other materials. It also includes new paintings as I have started to learn how to paint – these include several self-portraits, from the very first painting to the most recent one. So, the exhibition is really about this idea of reimagining victory as the act of learning rather than conquest. The exhibition also includes a small work entitled The Conductors which is a work in process for a new journey in the making of a new kind of orchestra with conductors.

What’s next, after your stay in Birmingham?

A little break I hope! And then to begin the next work with conductors and dancers in the creation of a new kind of Orchestra for 2015! Watch this space.

Friction Arts and Anthea Moys collaborative project will take place between Monday 20 and Sunday 26 October 2014 in at venues such as mac birmingham, The Drum and Birmingham Rep. 

For more information, see: www.frictionarts.com and www.townshipcafe.frictionarts.com.

Further details of Anthea’s work can be found at www.antheamoys.com

Words by Dave Freak