Phoka Nyokong
contemporary collaboration art
A Feast of Wombs
Selected for Joburg Fringe screening 2018, 2019
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A silent film, shot on a handheld device.
A comment on contemporary media and means available to the video artist.
An attitude of disruption.
An episode of a series of experiments with the cellphone archive.
Domesticity, with rawness and immediacy.
A mundane dinner scene served in a South African working-class household.
Unidentified residents.
A concoction.
Of abortion advertisements, spoilt meat and other junk.
An allegory to the persistence of a familial violence inherent in the quest for our self-sufficiency, playing itself out behind the curtains of many an African family.
Song of Imag-ency
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In this short film, the use of found digital material is a form of recycling. It recognises aspects of appropriation wherein we don’t just receive handed-down stories from large media corporates, but instead intervene to facilitate narratives that see us contesting news headlines that often portray our societies in Africa as the spoken-about subaltern.
Imag-ency = image + emergency
The use of song is a cry of emergency in response of the images of violence in the film. The film was made during public protest violence in Johannesburg and Pretoria, 2019. Following these acts of violence, related media circulated through on the public's phones via WhatsApp. The film appropriates such media, juxtaposed with worship material.
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What is the innate need for both spirituality and malevolence in the make up of man?
How far we can push and explore the arbitrary broadcasting of current public events through everyday archives such as WhatsApp? How much could we, outside of the mainstream media, influence events that are in the process of becoming news headlines?
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contemporary | collaborative | interdisciplinary