Terrabeau

Tracey Rose (b. 1974, Durban, South Africa) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1996 from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and earned a Masters of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2007.
Tracey Rose’s work reflects the cultural, economic, and political differences that mark the contemporary world – in particular, post-apartheid South Africa – as well as identity-related and ethnic issues. Rose belongs to a generation of artists charged with reinventing the artistic gesture in post-apartheid South Africa. She has defined a provocative visual world whose complexities reflect the social and political difficulties of the task at hand.
In her performances, which are often for the camera, Rose places her body at the centre stage. She inhabits roles given to Africans, to African women, and to women in a male-dominated world. In her quest to understand the source of these cultural stereotypes, she is inevitably drawn to religious myths of creation.
For EVA International 2016, Rose has developed a new performance and installation while on residency at IMMA | Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and also in Limerick. TERRABEAU (2016) is an installation based on a puppet show that uses hand, finger, and sock puppets as well as video footage of actors playing various characters in costume. The puppet show is both live and pre-recorded, and draws from one of the many horrific scenes from the 1966 Italian shockumentary Africa Adio, by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. The two primary characters/narrators of Africa Adio are Siamese zebras who have been chained and tripped-up by a group of white men. The zebra also references the a famous quote by Pik Botha, South African foreign minister in the dying days of apartheid: ‘South Africa is like a zebra, if you shoot the white stripe it will die, you cannot kill the white stripe without killing the animal ...’ The script for the puppet show is developed using a template from a YouTube clip featuring bland commentary on Irish history.