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The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) is proud to announce 2022 ICA Live Art Fellow, Samkela Stamper, and her upcoming installation and performance – showing in both Peddie and Cape Town – titled Isikhumbuzo.

Courtesy of the artist.

Isikhumbuzo is an ongoing work, emerging out of Stamper’s Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, that is preoccupied with, and attempts to uncover, Stamper’s familial archive – an archive that was meant to be hidden, but one that decreed to uncover itself using the artist and her work as a tool. 

Stamper writes: “Hence my journey to be nearer to home for a while…a journey which manifested itself in me becoming a student at the University Currently Known As Rhodes and subsequently turning my grandmother’s house eyayiyeka Malume elalini, during my third year, into an Art Galari.”

Isikhumbuzo, which takes the form of a site-specific installation and performance, uses elements of lighting, dried chicken feet, uMqombothi and the congregation of food with the community in the galari itself as a way of engaging with ancestral archives.

After the artist’s numerous engagements with the archive, the time has now come to bury it. “…Because at times, the end marks the beginning.”

Samkela Stamper, founder of the Thandeka Stamper Art Galari eNgqushwa and co-founder of The Open Space in Makhanda, is a poet, playwright, visual and performing artist, an independent producer and a curator. She is passionate about urban renewal and public art development of rural and township spaces and has initiated and facilitated public art and creative projects commissioned by various organisations.

Stamper has performed and exhibited her works in notable festivals and spaces such as the Edinburgh International Festival & Fringe Festival, Innibos, Open Book Festival, Jozi Book Fair, Constitution Hill, the World Economic Forum in Cape Town, Infecting the City public art festival, and the 100 Flavours Exhibition. She has been an artist in residence for Assembly Festival and Afrovibes UK.

Stamper recently received a 2021/22 Provincial Arts & Culture Award in Visual Arts – Curatorship.

Isikhumbuzo wil be taking place in Peddie from the 28th of September until the 4th of October 2022, and in Cape Town in mid October 2022. For more information, please visit ICA.

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