Athi-Patra Ruga: Lord, I gotta keep on (movin’)

The multidisciplinary practice of Athi-Patra Ruga (b. Umtata, Eastern Cape, South Africa; lives and works in Cape Town and Hogsback, Eastern Cape) centers on myths—their creation, their unraveling, and their relationship to power and liberation. Through performance, film, painting, textile, and glass, Ruga creates allegorical figures using craftsmanship as a strategy of re-embodiment. His figures move through utopic and dystopic realms, aspects of which in turn draw from Xhosa history and legend as well as post-apartheid South Africa. Since 2012, many of Ruga’s projects have centered on the imagined realm of Azania, an ancient Greek reference to a southeastern region of Africa. Azania was taken up by activists in the struggle to end apartheid, invoking both a precolonial Black homeland and a decolonized, liberated South Africa.

Ruga’s Azania is rife with hybridity, pomp, ritual, and gender play. A “Versatile Queen” helms this non-dynastic Black matriarchal society amid an evolving pantheon of beings who seductively unravel entrenched power dynamics around race and sexuality. Connecting with historical and present-day figures—the biblical Ruth, the dancer and Harlem Renaissance muse Francois “Féral” Benga, the artist Rotimi-Fani Kayode, the South African pop star Brenda Fassie, and Ruga’s own grandmother—his protagonists move through hybrid worlds with the agency of rematriation. In the making and unmaking of narratives, Ruga offers up ways to persevere through a fractured present, marked by the unfulfilled promise of past liberation movements but imbued with the emancipatory possibilities of queer Black femme culture.

Ruga’s most recent solo exhibitions are Amadoda on the Verge... (2024) at BKhz gallery in Johannesburg and Act One... In Travesti (2021) at Eva Presenhuber Gallery in New York. Additional recent presentations and performances include iiNyanga Zonyaka at Norval Foundation, Cape Town; Interior/ Exterior / Dramatis Personae at WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town; and the acclaimed Of Gods, Rainbows and Omissions at Somerset House, London. Ruga’s art features in the publications African Artists 1882 to Now (2021), Black Artists Shaping the World (2021), and In the Black Fantastic (2022). His artworks are held in significant private collections and internationally renowned public collections including Zeitz MOCAA (Museum of Contemporary Art Africa), Cape Town; the Homestead Collection at the Norval Foundation, Cape Town; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; Museion (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), Bolzano, Italy; Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Iziko Museums of South Africa; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Ekard Collection, The Netherlands; and Servais Collection, Brussels.

Curated by Stamatina Gregory, Head Curator / Director of Exhibitions and Collections