THEME PARK - OUPA SIBEKO

Lemkus Gallery presents Theme Park, a solo exhibition by Oupa Sibeko featuring works produced in residence alongside previous works and remnants of past performances. Sibeko is an esteemed performance artist from Johannesburg, whose career has been shaped by prestigious local and international residencies/fellowships (Reykjavík, Iceland; Windhoek, Namibia; Leipzig, Germany; Stuttgart, Germany; Johannesburg, South Africa; Cape Town, South Africa). The current post-residency exhibition marks Sibeko’s debut solo presentation in the city of Cape Town and signals his desire to establish himself within the local arts ecosystem.

A consistent feature of Sibeko’s work is his commitment to the grammar of play in cultural production— a silver thread that connects every project he has undertaken. While some may ascribe a general passivity to the process of play or may doubt its generative capacity as a vehicle for critical thought, Oupa Sibeko’s work succinctly exposes the structures that regulate daily life, latent behavioral conventions, and residues of colonial violence in the public domain. Despite not claiming themselves as direct forms of critique, Sibeko’s artistic expositions have great social, political, and ontological implications. Take for instance his long-standing engagement with ‘surface play’ as a way of marking the relation between the Black body and space, revealing his ability to conceptualize and resolve these encounters with great wit and spontaneity.

For Sibeko, performance is also a pledge, a way to fulfil his vow to continue to play throughout life[1]. As a mandate for making maintained through all his works, play inevitably takes different forms and points of focus. At times the performance is purely momentary. Sometimes there are traces. Sometimes the traces are the work. Following this logic, he proceeds to play on usual and unusual surfaces, employing frottage on canvas to lift the texture of street pavers in Zonnebloem (previously District Six), using targets collected from a shooting range at Vredehoek Quarry as the basis for abstract drawings on cardboard, or testing coarse sandpaper as the substrate for pastel illustrations. These material and site-based interventions trace a psychogeography of the city.

Sibeko works on surfaces in ways that parody but also partake in the labour and leisure of traditional artmaking, yet in ways that necessitate a performative act. Dragging the canvas through the street, laying it down, rubbing the street surface into the fabric, tracing a pothole, drawing the company of pedestrians, rolling it back up, lugging it back to studio. Works resulting from this process treat the city environment as a sort of playground, while simultaneously functioning as records of everyday life. In their movement through space, they capture innocent and/or childlike, leisurely, laborious, and overtly violent sensibilities of being. With all their scratches and smudges and bullet holes, they show the diverse ways in which spaces are taken up, who has access to them, and what forms of amusement are fostered there. Coupled with Sibeko’s disciplinary range, the volume and scale of works that stem from these surface encounters, including previous pieces and references to past projects, make the gallery a ‘theme park,’ a multifaceted zone segmented for different mechanisms of play and affective encounters. The city, then, could also be considered a theme park, and so could the gallery. 

Without its implied achievement, the exhibition draws from a retrospective sensibility of curation to fully present the breadth of Oupa Sibeko’s practice. The rooms of the gallery have been dedicated to different projects, periods, and material propositions. Certain sections encourage audience participation, welcoming touch, repositioning, and resolution. Through its strategic display, Theme Park invites viewers to engage with the many registers of play manifest in Sibeko’s oeuvre and to recognize the potential of performative play as a precursor for new cultural forms and modes of artistic intervention.


[1] Sibeko’s sole guardian during his early childhood was his grandmother, ‘Ouma’, who passed when he was ten years old. At the time of her passing she left with him one instruction— to never stop playing. Sibeko’s artistic practice to date has been a way of enacting his grandmother’s dying wish, which extends not only to the act of play but also its theorization.