Swallow My Pride
curated by
Margaret Stone, Dale Washkansky, Lizza Littlewort and William Martin.
03/03/2010- 20/03/2010
Ernest van der Wal, Slaying David (Say My Name Bitch)
Participating artists: Zanele Muholi, Andrew Putter, Pierre Fouché and Werner Ungerer, Ernst Van der Wal, Lizza Littlewort, Anne Historical and Lhola, Robert Hamblin, Julie Donald, Tony East, Kai Lossgott, Jody Paulsen , Igshaan Adams, Genevieve Louw and Johke Steenkamp, William Martin, Lindsay Nel, Andrea Brand, and Linda Stupart
Like Morrissey's outburst against the irrelevance of the mainstream disco scene to his lived experience of gay London in the '80s, Swallow My Pride is a visceral response to the commercialisation of gay culture in Cape Town. The title subverts the slogan Gay Pride, once an urgent call to march and make visible the diversity and difference of local queer culture. Now the Gay Pride March is corporatized and co-opted, and commodifies gay experience into a market run lifestyle option in "post-gay" society, where pink money buys acceptance into the hetero-normative capitalist hierarchy.
This constructed stereotype is not only conservative, inhibited and achingly dull; crucially it dismisses the real-life diversity of the gay community, where issues of race, poverty, religion, discrimination and self-acceptance continue to be a daily struggle.
There is strong commitment from the contributors to this show has generated exciting work. A powerful interweaving has emerged of the personal and the political in contemporary gay South Africa. As the commodified gay stereotype is subverted, so too the conservative aesthetic conventions which construct this stereotype are pulled apart and questioned in a witty and innovative critique of mainstream art. The wide range of work includes photography, painting, drawing, video, animation, installation, intervention and anti-art strategies, and brings into a fresh focus the courage, suffering, humor, intelligence and enormous variety of local queer culture.
