Selected Projects

Dorothee Kreutzfeldt
2001 - 2007

2007

“No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead, yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, Azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit, till all white in whiteness.. No way in, go, measure… go back out.”
Samuel Beckett

There’s a man going around taking names

Collaboration with Simon Gush, Joao Ferreira Gallery, March 2007 24 hour installation

The installation was produced for X-Cape, the official fringe of CAPE 07 (‘not another biennale’). It included ‘ranger-circle', a video-projection by Gush that references a. traditional sculptures of colonial explorers and what they stand for. b. rangers and game-parks containing a particular experience of 'Africa'. c. The role of the trackers and rangers in the reserves is not only to monitor the wildlife and prevent game poaching, but also, as in the case of South Africa’s Kruger National Park, to curb the influx of illegal immigrants who cross the borders from Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Kreutzfeldt’s wall-paintings displayed a triptych of landscapes, ‘koppies’ (Afrikaans for ‘hill’), photographed on the eastern end of inner city Johannesburg. Two soldiers from the Castle of Good Hope were invited to attend the opening. A drummer dressed in a drum majorette uniform from Brackenfell High, an established high school in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, played different marching rolls at random intervals.


















Ndoto ya Baba

Collaboration with Severine Hubard. Kinshasa 2007.As part of the Urban Scenographies Residency Roof-painting, Lingwala


The painted field on the roof is only visible to people living in the only two high-rise buildings in this neighbourhood. The buildings highlight that make-shift living conditions in the area - half completed to this day due to a construction fault and effectively a concrete skeleton without doors, windows, railing, electricity and running water. Two families live on each floor. One week before the painting was completed a person fell from the 5th floor and died. In Lingala Ndoto ya baba translates as the dream of a deaf mute and describes an illusion or a dream that one will aspire to throughout one's life.




























3 Point Turn

Collaboration with Simon Gush, realised by Sam Matenji. Drill Hall, January 2007.


Gush and Kreutzfeldt commissioned a former combi-taxi driver, Sam Matenji, to do stunt performances in front of the Drill Hall during peak hour traffic. Opposite from the Drill Hall lies one of the city¹s main taxi ranks, with over 150 000 commuters passing daily and catching communal taxies to the north and south of the city as well as to cross border destinations. The entrance to the Drill Hall is practically an informal taxi-repair and wash station.

The task was to do 3 x 3 point turns on a one way road and drive back against the traffic. The action was viewed from the balcony of the Point Blank Gallery. We screened pirated video sections from legendary car-race movies, while serving free beer.

















2006

Painting is such a pain


My work is often triggered by places, situations and stories ­they can be specific, fictional or haphazard - bomb attacks, vacant buildings, historical sites, private gardens, landscapes, murder, mundane encounters etc. What draws me is their charge, how they speak about a specific moment in our times; how they relate absurdities, value systems and vulnerabilities. We seem to be living in increasingly complex crisis. Violence pervades. Never mind urban planning. The impulse here would be about entering these realities, comprehending, and producing a grammar, a vocab, that can offset and reclaim personal and intimate spaces, offer a conversation, a moment to dream towards a future.
Dorothee Kreutzfeldt

Adversary

One Night Event, Parking Gallery, Joahnnesburg, October 2006.Runners: Steve Dikobo and Zongamele Dyubeni, (Gauteng Striders), Isaac Masilele (Harmony Gold) and Andries Ramaala. (www.parking-gallery.net)

I contracted four professional athletes to run for the night in unison, backwards and forwards, connecting the walls. Their movement ‘made’ the space. I had started documenting the chopshops, panel-beaters and car mechanics in the area. I wanted to stage a fictional situation that took the cue from the world of competitive races, entitlement and territorial make belief. A hidden electronic metronome set a slow, regular pace.






Artist in Residency at PROGR, Bern, Nov-Dec 2006

One week installation at project raum marksblond (www.marksblond.com).

In Switzerland an average of 6 people choose to die daily (euthanasia is legalised). In South Africa an average of 6 people get murdered each day. In the space, a former kiosk, I installed flags and banting and a rotating fan. The audience couldn’t see the fan, which gently moved the flags every 12 seconds, counting down 15308 days, which equals 43 years - the average life expectancy in SA.










stranger days

script for a painting in a room
Installation at outlet, Pretoria, 2006

"Until the child is born this will be his life."
J.M Coetzee, Disgrace

"When the day finally comes to forget me, you will return to your self."
Rita Potenza












































2005

A Jamais

Video-installation in four pieces Residency at CRIC, Sierre, May 2005

Performance and Video/installation, ice-hockey stadium and Les Halles, Sierre With the assistance of Samuel Dematraz (film, editing), Guillaume Equivoz and Antoine Deleze (fencers).

I produced 2 paintings for a local ice-hockey stadium and asked 2 fencers to fight in the stadium. The slogan of the ice-hockey team is ‘a jamais’ (=forever/until death). The performance was filmed and presented as a four-piece video projection in a former car factory. In the video the paintings acted as backdrops. Sport has been part of my work for a while - I was interested in the connotations of fencing and ice-hockey, the undercurrent rules, erotics and violence - how they contribute to popular and national imaginary and identity.















2004

painting in public

Public intervention in collaboration with sign-writers Beki Ngwenya, Thabiso Spieks Banda, Ozor Ejike Ezefuna,, Nabil Burhan Batenga, Alindo Gustavo Mula and Edward Solomon Lekala. Johannesburg 2004

As part of my masters at the WITS School of Arts, I worked with five sign-writers on a series of site-specific paintings in Johannesburg. Each painting was designed for a vacant building and picked up on both the history of the place as well as the day to day use by traders and commuters. Most of the sites are still bricked up and mothballed and reflect a moment in Johannesburg's passage between decay and reinvention as an African world-class city. The sign-writers who participated work around the city but originate from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Tanzania. Their professional work attests to the strong tradition of sign writing across Africa, but also reflects broader migration processes, informal networks and survival tactics in Johannesburg. Some the of the signs have disappeared ­ in a way they have now become a layer in the urban material.






2002

I like the way you polish my nine millimetres

Collaboration with Jean Brundit, video installation, The Castle of Good Hope.

The installation was produced for Y-Desire, a multi-disciplinary one-night event at the Castle of Good Hope, the oldest monument in Cape Town and a symbol of the State’s military might during the years of Apartheid. The videos displayed two women in uniform (police and Defense Force) singing Patsy Kline’s song ‘Crazy’ in karaoke to each other.









2002

in view of you

In collaboration with James Webb (sound), Jane Appleby (research), Renate Meyer (research) and Veronica Klaptocz (curatorial assistance).
FRESH RESIDENCY programme at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town

“Another solution is possible. It requires the restructuring of the world’.
Franz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks

Cape Town is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.

In View of View was produced as part of the FRESH residency and addressed a spell of bomb attacks that hit the city between 1998 and 2000. The 22 bomb attacks wreaked a sense of terror and damage that impacted on the daily lives of inhabitants. It strongly highlighted social fissures as well as consistent racial and spatial segregation. Today bomb-attacks in urban spaces will always be viewed in relation to September 11 and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. At the time I was interested in what these incidences meant for the city and its people; how they were represented and how individuals coped with the trauma. Issues of bearing witness, confession and reconciliation had a specific currency at the time, which saw the effects and controversies around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission unfold.

I worked with a team of artists and researchers, trauma councilors and witnesses on locating as much material as possible, including interviews with survivors who took a great risk of re-telling their stories. The outcomes were presented in the SA National Art Gallery as a sound installation. Each speaker relayed the account of an individual who had survived an attack in different places in Cape Town.

ARTIST

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2004-2007

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