Ngasese (Revival Fire), 2018 - present
Over the past few years, my video practice has revolved around a project called Ngasese or Revival Fire. The project has a number of collaboraters including but not limited to Sean Davenport and Samuel Sincuba. It is based on Audre Lorde's methodology of biomythography and in her words is "the only way to tell my story".
Drawing inspiration from the aesthetic of exploitation cinema, the intention is to produce a radical experiment in alchemizing fragments of lived experience.
Using found, real time and abstract footage, the narrative reforms itself embalming past traumas while aiming to produce a stylized and imaginative (un)finished product.
The Church Is In Mourning, 2018
Using found footage from the 1956 Brazilian film Black Orpheus directed by Marcel Camus, and a scene featuring Shirley Caesar from The Fighting Temptations as well as Youtube videos of South African Zionist churches. Inspired by these fragments of found materials Heidi Sincuba incorporated footage of themself performing a ritual inside the Grahamstown Cathedral.
Revival Fire, 2018
Based on footage from the Kwasizabantu Mission film of the same name, featuring its leader Erlo Stegen, clips of race play porn, a sound clip from Davido's smash hit Afro Pop single "If", combined with scenes from the meditative mountains of Makhanda, this alchemic video explores the endless agony of language and its betrayals.
Corrugated Irons, 2018
Collected Footage from the internet, foil, fabric, corrugated iron - all examples of the great African tradition of making somehting out of nothing. Cutting, pasting, remixing, scatting, improvising. Forming new possibilities from the random intersections.
War Within, 2018
Collated from documentary footage from the apartheid era, this video speaks not only to the impulse for protest, but also to the apparent inevitability of what william Kentrige calls 'the failure of revolution'.
Amahlaya Endlela, 2017-present
In IsiZulu, Amahlaya Endlela means sex without penetration and directly translates to: “the fun of the road”. As part of an ongoing investigation into what constitutes reality, I've been attracted to the slippage between outer space, (physical surroundings or perception) and our inner selves (subjectivity or memory). Through my smartphone, I've traced evidence of this slippage through fallen braids strewn across my country.
Bearing in mind the geographic location as well as style of braid, I have speculated on the forces of memory held within each specimen. Anonymous as they are, each evokes movement and time, and ultimately desire and futility. While they are called singles in vernacular spaces, they are a collective symbol of black womxnhood which perpetually marks our gendered and racialized landscape.
Canon Colony, 2010 -2018
This work began as part of the "I Love the West and the West Loves Me" body of work which I presented for my graduation at Artez Art Academy in Arnhem, Netherlands. The work attempted to explore the archetypes of representation in Western visual culture and it is where my obsession with red, white and blue began.