Like Morrissey's outburst
against the irrelevance of the mainstream disco scene to his lived
experience of gay London in the '80s, Swallow My Pride is a visceral
response to the commercialisation of gay culture in Cape Town.
The title subverts the slogan
Gay Pride, once an urgent call to march and make visible the diversity and
difference of local queer culture. Now the Gay Pride March is
corporatised and coopted, and commodifies gay experience into a market run
lifestyle option in "post-gay" society, where pink money buys acceptance
into the hetero-normative capitalist hierarchy. This constructed
stereotype is not only conservative, inhibited and achingly dull;
crucially it dismisses the real-life diversity of the gay community, where
issues of race, poverty, religion, discrimination and self-acceptance
continue to be a daily struggle.
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There is strong commitment from the contributors to this
show that has generated exciting work. A powerful interweaving has
emerged of the personal and the political in contemporary gay South
Africa. As the commodified gay stereotype is subverted, so too the
conservative aesthetic conventions which construct this stereotype are
pulled apart and questioned in a witty and innovative critique of
mainstream art. The wide range of work includes photography, painting,
drawing, video, animation, installation, intervention and anti-art
strategies, and brings into a fresh focus the courage, suffering, humour,
intelligence and enormous variety of local queer culture.
Participating artists: Zanele Muholi, Andrew Putter, Pierre
Fouché and Werner Ungerer, Ernst Van der Wal, Lizza Littlewort, Anne
Historical, Robert Hamblin, Julie Donald, Tony East, Kai Lossgott, Jody
Paulsen , Igshaan Adams, Genevieve Louw and Johke Steenkamp, William
Martin, Lindsay Nel, Andrea Brand, and Linda Stupart.
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