animate, breathe, act, perform, form, vivify, animacy, enliven, alive, rehumanise
I create spaces that are both charged and playful, that speak of beauty, balance and proportion, all of which have the potential to violently and forcefully unwind before your eyes. A feeling that ones physical and emotional self is at risk of being caught up, tangled and captured by what surrounds one. The spaces explore cause and effect, discomfort, the arduous tasks committed to order the unfathomable. It is through the intense process driven nature of my work that I attempt to evoke and entice, twist and turn through aesthetics and materiality. I aim to unwind the ordered. My work is formed, deformed and reformed.
When the French Roman Catholic missionary priest Francis Aupiais was sent by the Society of African Missions to Dahomey (now Benin) in the early 1900s he discovered it was difficult to capture peoples interest in Catholicism. It is said that Zounon Medjé, the Vodun King of the Night advised him to adapt his mass to resemble local traditions and customs.
In this 30 minute performance Bronwyn Lace responds to a film created by Aupiais in January 1930, it shows the Epiphany Festival being celebrated in the Beninese city of Porto Novo.
50 years later and 7000 km across the African continent in rural Botswana Lace was born and at just over a month old cast as baby Jesus in the same festival. Having recently returned from a research trip following Aupiais's journey Lace now shares a series of mistranslations, misinterpretations and slipped meanings that have informed her understanding of self.
Film credit: Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine). Francis Aupiais et Frédéric Gadmer, Fête de l’Épiphanie, Porto-Novo, Dahomey (Bénin), 12 janvier 1930
Feast or Famine is a video installation, drawn from thousands of timelapse images taken in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Vienna in mid-2016.
Over a period of 3 days a photograph was taken every minute capturing Dermestes maculatus (carrion beetle) frenetically feasting on the flesh of a gasping Tyto alba (barn owl). Manipulation of this footage has resulted in a video installation together with a sound component, created collaboratively by meditating of the sounds of mourning by South African composers and vocalists Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Xolisile Bongwana. Cinematography by Victor Neustetter, editing by Noah Cohen. Special thanks to The Natural History Museum Vienna and Mirjana Pavlovic. The film conjures up the lunacy of hunger and entrapment – even desire, and highlights the dank underbelly of gestation simultaneous to decomposition. Antithesis is always a certainty – as daunting as the human condition. And these transient and transitional carriers of life culminate in altars for the dead. Lace is centrally concerned with the theme of transition, giving form to mired and illuminated thresholds. Neither complex nor simple, Lace attempts to strip her thoughts of 'flesh' thereby intensifying the material and the void.
Make it stand out
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Make it stand out
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
In Still Life we see Lace’s collection of bones cleaned, gilded, threaded, dutifully photographed and digitally blended into one another on a four-screen video installation. Lace’s instinct as an artist has been to use and transform the darker elements of life – death and decay, abandonment and neglect – as ingredients to foster in-between spaces or platforms portraying the significance of fragility and vulnerability. Collaboration is central to Still Life. The silent video works and installation elements find themselves in conversation with landscape music composer Anne Vanschothorst’s spoken word project klip lied snaar: voordrag van gedigte en harpmusiek, a collaborative compositional project made in response to the poetry and voice of Antjie Krog. The selected poems by Krog are ‘Still Life’, ‘Land van Genade en Verdriet’, ‘Die Ligaam Beroof’, and ‘Grond’.
