I work across disciplines as a writer, lecturer, curator and artist. Trained as a mathematician, I would eventually enter the art world, more or less by chance. As such it is difficult to define my practice in a simple way, it is defined by adaptability, interdisciplinarity and collaboration. After completing a masters in literary and cultural theory, where my thesis presented a close reading of Enlightenment aesthetics, particularly Kant, I began teaching at the Michaelis school of fine art and the school of architecture at the University of Cape Town, only to make a third shift from theory to art practice via several collaborative projects. I am a member of the all girl collective, Doing it for Daddy, who work within and against art world structures, in a form of what we call rugged conceptualism, that has included a framing stall set up outside the National Gallery during the opening of the Transcape Biennale. In 2007 we were selected as one of the winners of the Spier Contemporary Art Award for our tour of the wine estate which hosted one of the largest sponsored art exhibitions in South Africa, a mixture of fictional narrative, site-specific installation and performance . Since then I have gone on to do several projects, all of which are defined by their performative, collaborative, interdisciplinary and spatial practices. In 2008, I produced two group shows, as well as a youth library project in inner city Johannesburg. I have also been working in performance under the name Anne Historical. Historical is a fictional persona that through her obvious constructedness enables me to employ satire in order to question the structures and conditions of the present, whether applied directly to the art world, or those social and political spaces that define the contemporary moment. Anne Historical is a trained art historian and ex-spy, with her origins in Eastern Europe (and Surrealism). She works with knitting, dying, and the formal lecture, always carrying an historical text. As such Historical is the perfect foil for my own play between disciplines, and the very real concern of my theoretical and academic work with the history of aesthetics. In February 2009 she collaborated with the Erf [81] cultural collective to produce a historical tour of the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town. Anne was subsequently invited to cook the Last Supper in Cameroonian/French artist Bili Bidjoka’s Do Not Take, Do Not Eat, This is Not My Body. Performed at the Drill Hall in inner city Johannesburg as part of the Urban Scenographies residency project. The exclusion of the audience from the final meal except for 12 guests selected by Historical was the work’s intention. The dinner was filmed and projected on the outside of the building, so that the ultimate form the work took was that of a ‘painting’ in public space. In both of these performance works, my role is very much focused on constructing and dressing the space of the performances.

This engagement with public space and site-specificity is the other thread through my work. My first curatorial project, Upstairs|Downstairs invited artists to work with and against the gallery space itself. Here I played an interventionist curatorial role. In the work of artist Ed Young, I gave permission to intervene in the work of another artist, Dan Halter by playing a squash game on Halter’s space, which had simply been installed with a red line of dymo tape across the back wall, resembling by all accounts a squash court. Halter subsequently removed his work. My intention as curator here had been for the artists to compete for and claim the gallery space, and while the decision was controversial it achieved interesting responses from the audience and critics (I still have a very good working relationship with Halter). In several other projects have worked in this style of sanctioned intervention, including a polygraph test held as part of the Johannesburg Art Fair in 2008, titled You Deserve the Truth. This was an unusual form of panel discussion where art world personalities were asked questions about art, truth and money. At this year’s Art Fair, Anne co-curated a booth with the Joubert Park Project, titled The Work You Requested. We staged the auction of four views of the inner city, a Bach performance in retrograde and the raising of two flags opposite demolition sites in the city. The intention here is two-fold: to begin to test the process by which work acquires value in different contexts and to begin to draw out the incommensurability of value systems and spaces. I am currently completing a book on the inner city of Johannesburg, titled Not No Place, with painter Dorothee Kreutzfeldt. Kreutzfeldt and I work under the collaborative name deadheat, recently staging a work in three parts at Blank project space in Cape Town, called Trifecta – image, voice, screen. Part of this work takes place in public spaces or non-sites, such as ‘drawing’ with red tape a rectangle with the same dimensions of the gallery space.