A browser-based installation by Tiger Maremela
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Where some things are beautiful & everything hurts (2018), by artist and strategist Tiger Maremela, is a browser-based audiovisual and text art installation that invokes critical race and digital culture theories - drawing on cultural symbols that have been adopted and widely shared by individuals - to queer standard media representations of black trans and intersex people upheld in the collective imagination of contemporary post-apartheid South Africa.
Using music, photography, video, collage and writing, the artist imagines the possibilities that could exist when we complicated our binary approaches; by inventing and alchemising news ways to view and engage with humans in and past gendered, sexed, classed, crippled, aged and racialised dynamics.
"Viewers are encouraged to interrogate how they value personhood" courtesy the artist, 2018.
The body of work sprawling across new media platforms invites audiences to engage and explore; alongside the artist, through a tangled experience of digital media and in-person interventions - how black youth are able to take up space - online and offline - and go about making spaces safer for others despite the Rainbow Nation’s resistance. Learn more about Tiger Maremela
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SEEN ON
PHOTOGRAPHY
The artist then turns the lense on themself, in self-portraits that form the series dituku/ dinaledi and coverperson(s).
dituku/ dinaledi allows the artist to confront questions of intergenerational dialogue and self-acceptance. coverperson(s) is a reimagination of early South African gay magazines and publishing, and the effects of limited perspectives on the representation in black queerness in early 2000s media on global politics.
MUSIC
Left to right: spectrum.za zine Open Call (featuring Untitled O08 from dituku/ dinaledi by Tiger Maremela. Right: spectrum.za edition 1.
"[spectrum.za] became a space where we could document and treasure this work on a single platform. The content however, doesn’t have to explicitly make mention of the fact that we are [living in a networked society] to accurately reflect our relationships with the internet, people and nature " courtesy of Design Indaba in conversation with the spectrum.za zine editorial team and the artist, Tiger Maremela , 2017.
MUSIC
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NSFW
Following the release of 6LMAFUTHA and dick4disco, the artist’s musical offerings from 2017, the artist returns with 3 experimental ambient EPs; justice, Prince Moroka/ Browser History and Future Soundscapes For Past Tense Traumas.
Taking inspiration from ballroom music made popular by black queer Americans, industrial motifs, global protests and ideas of what space travel sounds like - the artist invites the listener on a musical journey that delves through childhood trauma, teenage infatuation, existential angst and political tension.
The commentary created through news clips, field recordings of everyday household fixtures, and the sounds of animals going about their lives results in layered, explorative dreamscapes that attempt to reveal societal bias, subjectivity and encourage reflection.
WRITING
With writing ranging poetry, personal essays and a series of newsletters, the artist works through experiences of online vulnerability, religious and sexual frustration, unrequited love, and hope. #Braambae is a concept zine that anthropomorphisises Braamfontein, South Africa by depicting a flawed, ambitious and complicit character in a rigged card game.
Excerpts from Falling in Love with Priests, a forthcoming chapbook, contemplates on young heartbreak through the lens of black masculinity.
Internet Treatz, a series of newsletters written by the artist and shared to a community of subscribers from 2016 to 2018 is an invitation into the artist’s browser history and heart. This is not a coming out story. is a short essay detailing the artist’s transition as a non-binary individual over the period of 2015 to 2018.
VIDEO + COLLAGE
Fast-paced news cycles, early web 1.0 meme culture, and the South African digital landscape are departure points that inform the virtual realities that appear in the video and collage series This is what it feels like to live inside the internet.
The overwhelming 360-environments transplant the viewer into the timeline, exposing audiences to a cluttered simulation of daily streams of conversations. The media's coverage of the safety of women and children across the world, theory pertaining to the different ways in which identities are constructed, land expropriation in South Africa, and the banality of globalization are visually challenged and interrogated.
EVENTS
Clockwise from top-left; poster of KU33R$ - a First Thursday bar-night held 7 June 2018 - in which the artist is billed as A VERY COOL TIME, a poster designed by the artist for Soundscapes of a Warzone - a live sound performance and exhibition held 7 June 2018 - in which the the artist appears as a solo artist, a poster designed by the artist for FLOURISH - an artist-centred nightlife intervention held on 20 November 2019 - in which the artist is also billed as A VERY COOL TIME, a photograph of Lerato Mbangeni and Liziwe Kwanini (of Love & Other Thugs) produced by Tiger Maremela for FLOURISH - an artist-centred nightlife intervention held on 20 November 2019 - in which the artist is also billed as A VERY COOL TIME, poster of KU33R$ - a First Thursday bar night held on 7 June 2018 - in which the artist is billed as A VERY COOL TIME. KU33R$ poster designed by Khanya The Designer, all other images supplied courtesy of the artist.
FAKIMALIUZOBONA
About the artist
Tiger Maremela, also known as A VERY COOL TIME, is a Johannesburg-based artist and strategist who spends their time observing, establishing and maintaining mutually viable relationships - while trying to make sense of the world by endlessly scrolling through the internet.
Maremela's transdisciplinary creative practice coalesces music production and DJing, collage-making, writing, organising and publishing to synthesise globally recognisable universal truths into strategic communications and cultural strategies and programmes that resonate across demographic and psychographic differences. Through this, they are able to create interventions that centre and empower black, queer, trans and intersex youth in post-apartheid South African media.
The artist's work has appeared on Skin Deep (UK), Quartz (US), and the City Press, 702 Talk Radio and eNCA News, with bylines in publications like Grocott's Mail, Mail & Guardian and Made Magazine (US). They have participated in digital residencies with the Stevenson Gallery and Floating Reverie, with nominations for the Foam Paul Huf Award (Germany) and collaborative work awarded a Gold Loerie in Media Innovation for the Nando's #RightMyName campaign (VMLY&R, Lead agency and MSL, Press and influencer agency) .
Maremela's decade in publishing and strategic communications has included them leading teams at enterprises including Webfluential (Global African Tik Tok Partner), MSL Group (of Publicis Groupe Africa) and Between 10and5 (African Blog of The Year Winner). They are the co-founder and Executive Director: Creative Transformation at A VERY COOL STUDIO, a creative and strategic advisory group consulting purposeful start-ups, state entities, and private partners across Southern Africa and the diaspora.
Tiger Maremela's forthcoming body of work Black Medium (2021), is a materially-dense, absurdly-tactile investigation into intimacy, magico-ritualism, and statehood.
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*Tiger Maremela goes by they/them pronouns.