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The Great South African Art Queue
Donna Kukama
Artwork 2009
Artwork: Donna Kukama, The Great South African Art Queue (2009). Performance with megaphone. Courtesy of the artist. Image courtesy of Alexia Webster.
Artist Donna Kukama Title The Great South African Art Queue Date 2009 Materials Performance with megaphone Credit Courtesy of the artist

This performance was included in the programming curated by Lerato Bereng for the opening of the exhibition Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance, December 12, 2009. It is indexed here as part of head curators Kathryn Smith and Roger van Wyk’s revisiting of the Dada South? Archive of materials at A4 Arts Foundation.

During the opening event of Dada South?, Kukama invited visitors to form a long queue outside the South African National Gallery. Queues are a common feature at European museums – such as the Louvre and the Centre de Pompidou in Paris – but largely absent at South African art institutions. Kukama's queue, at once staged and spontaneous, played between fiction and fact (being less a mechanism of ticket sales than one of performance). Regardless, the work resulted in the then-longest art queue in the history of South Africa – a record presumably yet to be broken.

b.1981, Mafikeng

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