Athi-Patra Ruga: …looking for The One.

Curated by Daniel Berger and John Neff.

Iceberg projects is proud to present a solo exhibition by acclaimed South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga. Following an initial research trip to the United States earlier this year, Ruga is returning to Chicago with reflections on private archives encountered in the collections of Carl van Vechten’s scrapbooks.

In this exhibition, Ruga uses the archive of 20th century photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten as a starting point to continue his decade-long interest in unpacking the response of black modernists to European and American negrophilia of the early 20th century. Through a series of oil pastel portraits, hand embroidered tapestry, and stained glass, Ruga probes the continued influence of these historical tropes on performativity, agency, and representations of the queer, male, black body. 

By creating a series of speculative portraits and studies of Van Vechten’s anonymous muse, Ruga seeks to reimagine an alternative for one nameless model exotically/erotically depicted in Van Vechten’s photographs. In this process, Ruga embodies a type of double consciousness by becoming both the artist and the muse, as he notes: 

“Portraiture is Performance and cannot be viewed without considering the historical, artistic, and political conditions in which the body is commodified for contemplation and by whom the image is consumed.

My intention is to expand on the artist’s studio performance in relation to the autonomy of the studio model whilst taking into account the historical power dynamics of Van Vechten’s images. 

In my artistic practice, the forgotten, erased, and problematised characters I depict in my work come from art history, my imagination, from life drawing, and serve as a continuation of my deep look at the complicit body, the eroticised body, and the queer body.

I am focussing on the black male body throughout industrialized history. I do this as a form of beatification and use it as a mechanism to free it from constraints in artistic style , genders, and subjective histories.”

—Athi-Patra Ruga, Eastern Cape, August 2023 

Biography
Athi-Patra Ruga is one of the few artists working in South Africa today whose work has adopted the trope of myth as a contemporary response to the post-apartheid era. Ruga creates alternative identities and uses these avatars as a way to parody and critique the existing political and social status quo. Ruga’s artistic approach of creating myths and alternate realities is in some way an attempt to view the traumas of the last 200 years of colonial history from a place of detachment—at a farsighted distance where wounds can be contemplated outside of personalized grief and subjective defensiveness.

The philosophical allure and allegorical value of utopia has been central to Ruga’s practice. His construction of a mythical metaverse populated by characters which he has created and depicted in his work have allowed Ruga to create an interesting space of self reflexivity in which political, cultural and social systems can be critiqued and parodied. Ruga has used his utopia as a lens to process the fraught history of a colonial past, to critique the present and propose a possible humanist vision for the future.

Athi-Patra Ruga is the 8th recipient of the Ruth Baumgarte Art Prize in Vienna. He has participated in internationally recognized exhibitions at Eva Presenhuber, New York; Haywood Gallery, London; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Performa 17, New York; An Age of Our Own Making, Holbaek, Denmark; South African Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale; Tate Modern in London; and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Ruga’s works form part of private, public collections including: the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington DC; the Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano Italy.

For press inquiries and information concerning the exhibition, contact icebergchicago@gmail.com / icebergchicago.com