Chorus, 2021, 2-channel video & sound installation, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas (2022), Installation views, Photos by Kevin Todora
chorus
2021
On the 24th of August 2019, Uyinene Mrwetyana, a 19-year old student at the University of Cape Town, was raped, tortured and bludgeoned to death by Luyanda Botha, who worked at her local post office. The following day Botha dumped her remains in an open field, dousing her body with petrol and setting it alight. Uyinene’s murder sparked public outcry: vigils were held, people wore black, thousands gathered in protest outside the South African Parliament in Cape Town, and nationwide. In response, the government acknowledged gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide as a national crisis, assigning over a billion South African Rand to emergency interventions and initiating a ‘National Strategic Plan’ for GBV. The puncture, exception and profound national reckoning of this crisis-moment held for many the promise of an historic turning point.
The days and then months that followed, however, gave way once more to the steady, incremental and terrifying reality of this crisis as norm, as an everyday of permissible violence. Women, children, queer and trans individuals continue to be victimised and killed. This is the violence of rape culture, rooted in the deep structure and social wounding of white, colonial, patriarchal power, and daily reconstituted through the misogynistic, homophobic and Afrophobic behaviours of toxic masculinity. It is a violence of disavowal through which raced, gendered and sexualized bodies remain the rapeable, killable, disposable matter of ungrievable life.
In Chorus, members of the University of Cape Town Choir sound a lament for Uyinene Mrwetyana – not as song, but the internally generated resonance of a hum, collectively sustained as a mutual offering of breath. In the utter loss marked by this labour, a certain recuperative gesture is nevertheless achieved, asserting conditions for hope in the communal recognition of Black feminine life. The choir’s performance resonates in intimate relation to the haunting presence of an empty rostrum, its quietude marking the absent presence of seven hundred and thirty-five individuals listed on a commemorative roll, whose lost lives similarly call for the long, collective, and as we must hope, transformative work of mourning.
Chorus is presented with the blessing of the Uyinene Mrwetyana Foundation