Tracey Rose
b. 1974, South Africa
Span II, 1997
Digital print in pigment inks on 100% cotton rag paper
65x91cm
Edition of 6
This is an image of a performance video installation created for the second Johannesburg Biennale that took place in 1997.
“Hair, within the context of apartheid body politics, played a crucial role in the subjugation and marginalization of the coloured body, inflicting upon it the most humiliating and degrading form of symbolic violence. Hair did not merely inscribe the body with a racial Otherness, but instead marked it as a ‘tainted’ site of ‘racial impurity’, acting as both a corporeal reminder of ‘miscegenation’, and a symbol of shame, degeneration and lowliness. It is from within this ambiguous racial landscape that Rose situates her own artistic practices, critically engaging with issues surrounding the gendered and racialized body,” writes Lee-At Meyerov in The use of hair as a manifestation of cultural and gender identity in the works of Tracey Rose (2006).
“Hair, within the context of apartheid body politics, played a crucial role in the subjugation and marginalization of the coloured body, inflicting upon it the most humiliating and degrading form of symbolic violence. Hair did not merely inscribe the body with a racial Otherness, but instead marked it as a ‘tainted’ site of ‘racial impurity’, acting as both a corporeal reminder of ‘miscegenation’, and a symbol of shame, degeneration and lowliness. It is from within this ambiguous racial landscape that Rose situates her own artistic practices, critically engaging with issues surrounding the gendered and racialized body,” writes Lee-At Meyerov in The use of hair as a manifestation of cultural and gender identity in the works of Tracey Rose (2006).