AFROVIBES SATURDAY

Tandile Mbatsha is a performance artist, choreographic-activist, educator, speaker, host, producer, model and scholar based in Cape Town, South Africa. They have performed at PERFORMA17 Biennale in New York and featured in Zoe Modiga's set at Afropunk. Performed an art installation with Viviers Studio at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and opened for FAKA at the Cape Town Electronic Music Festival. Produced the Solo Ball, a film, on the virtual National Arts Festival curated programme and recently hosted and managed the event for Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education’s Pocket Queerpedia launch. They have also worked with internationally acclaimed artist Zanele Muholi.

Tandile premiered their work ‘Intyatyambo Iyaphuma Engxondorheni’ at Gavin Krastin’s Arcade, an annual nomadic platform. They seek to break hegemonic notions of existence through the use of performance art to bring about critical awareness of the LGBTIQ+ community. They identify as a gender non-conforming body living in an intersectional “male” body and are a masters candidate at the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies through the Institute for Creative Arts.

Sunni Lamin Barrow (b. 1998) is a pluridisciplinary artist and performing curator from The Gambia, based in the Netherlands. His multi-award winning practice engages deeply into identity, belonging, and the endurance of the human spirit, particularly through the reference of African queer migratory experiences.

Blending poetry, performance, and curation, Sunni explores themes of love, loneliness, grief, queerness, Blackness, global citizenship, and reimagined kinship. His spellbinding works have been staged at renowned venues including the Van Gogh Museum, Huis Marseille, Kunsthal Museum, Oerol Festival, het National Theater and the Netherlands Theater Festival amongst many.

In 2023, Sunni premiered A Fist of Tongues, a critically acclaimed spoken word theater piece that confronts trauma and survival through a dialogue between his many selves. The production was nominated for the National BNG Bank Theater Prize and made a national tour in the Netherlands for two years.

Sunni is a Master’s student at DAS Theater, where he is pioneering the research and development of Spoken Word Theater as a distinct genre, inculcating the raw emotionality of spoken word poetry with the structure of contemporary sounds, rituals and performances. His work continues to bridge personal narratives with universal resonance, sculpturing a lifelong artistic legacy.

Jay Pather is a choreographer, curator and academic. Based in Cape Town, he is a Professor and directs the Institute for Creative Arts at UCT, curates Infecting the City Public Art Festival and the ICA Live Art Festival. He also curates for Afrovibes in the Netherlands and for the Bienalle of Body, Image Movement in Madrid is curatorial adviser for Live Art for Season Africa 2020 in various cities in France. He has co-curated for Spielart in Munich and has been Adjunct Curator for Performance at the Zeitz MOCAA. Recent addresses include for Festival of the Future City (UK), Independent Curators International (New York) and at the Haus der Kunst (Munich). He has recently published a book, Transgressions, Live Art in South Africa with Catherine Boulle, Recent articles appear in Changing Metropolis ll, Rogue Urbanism, Performing Cities and Where Strangers Meet. He chaired the jury for the recent International Award for Public Art, was appointed Fellow at the University of London and was recently made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of Arts and Letters) by the French Government.