This Saturday 24 October at 5pm the ICA will present the Online Fellowship launch and access to the first group of Fellows exploring the thematic of Process, Form and Engagement.

At the launch, happening entirely online, the ICA has invited international artist, curator and educator, Gabi Ngcobo to give a keynote address. 

Still image of one of the ICA Online Fellows. Our Gardens (2020) by Arafa C. Hamadi.

Straight after the launch, access to the first projects by ICA Fellows Mmakhotso Lamola, Billy Langa, Rehane Abrahams and Opiyo Okach will be available on the newly launched Fellowship website.
                   

From left to right: Mmakhotso Lamola, Billy Langa, Rehane Abrahams and Opiyo Okach.

About Playing with Process, Form and Engagement Part I

Lamola, Langa, Abrahams and Okach explore ideas of perpetual change in our current times and processes, made palpable in a range of art forms. Through various individual frameworks of enquiry, their projects gesture to notions of the body as an archive in constant flux.

Lamola is an artist and spatial practitioner based in Cape Town. Her work focuses on investigations in the immersive in-between spaces of disciplines. In her project she develops narrated maps, 3D worlds and publications complicating the cityscape of Cape Town.

Still image of Mmakhotso Lamola's The Belonging Collective.
 

Langa is an award-winning actor, playwright, and educator who takes a curious approach to theatre that’s deeply relational to the body – puzzling out what theatre means to those who perform it and those who witness it. In his project The Full Circle, Langa presents a body of poems constructed to fragment a narrative that is carried in both physicality and voice. It is placed in a timeless space of existence, which explores the primary themes of being; chaos and beauty; blood and birth as well as love and war in the same frame. Through the lens of other collaborators, the work takes a different shape, and becomes many folds, it can be seen as various ideas expanding into wells and circles of new knowing and meaning-making.

Still image of Billy Langa's project The Full Circle.

For Abrahams, the Fellowship has served as a catalyst for research into the next phase of her performance practice. As a direct consequence of Covid and not being able to perform the play Womb of Fire/Brandbaar she became interested in what the play's stated aims of decolonising the performer's body could mean as a broader methodology. 

Still image of Rehane Abrahams' project, Womb of Fire/Brandbaar.

Okach and his collaborators, Alejandro Olarté, Rapasa Otieno, Joseph Kamaru (KMRU), Waithera Lena Schreyek and I-Fen Lin contemplate the idea of being present in a particular place at a particular moment – the notion of ‘Me here right now’ when people, place and time are one. But what happens when place and ultimately time become multiple? The project titled instanceNow: People Time Place explores multiplicities of time, place and geography converging in an instance of shared difference, and a moment of live performance. 

Still image of Opiyo Okach's project, instanceNow: People Time Place.

For the launch programme on Saturday 24 October, Okach and his collaborators will perform live from different locations around the world. Okach calls the performance a "choreographic dispositive" where the performers and audiences will be able to interact and exchange data in real-time using online networks and social media. This will be live streamed on the newly launched fellowship website.

Join us at 5pm on Saturday 24 October online!