Explore the unexpected intersections of art, activism, and the everyday with Live Projects 4, an extension of the exhibition Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa.

See what happens when South African artists and activists interject their work and ideas into San Francisco’s urban structure, presenting performances, public conversations, and creative encounters that draw attention to the way small interpersonal exchanges can carry widespread political weight.

Part of the program:

Kemang Wa Lehulere, courtesy of the artist and Stevevson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

Kemang Wa Lehulere: The Grass Is Always Greener on the Other Side 

Saturday, March 1, 2014, 4:00 p.m.
Sunday, March 2, 2014, 2:00 p.m.

A multimedia artist based in Johannesburg, Kemang Wa Lehulere is interested in the intersections of personal narrative and collective history, memory, and amnesia. His recent work engages themes of unearthing the past in South Africa and beyond. This performance accompanying Wa Lehulere’s installation in Public Intimacy focuses on the figure of Nat Nakasa (1937-1965), a black South African anti-apartheid writer and journalist for Drum magazine who died suspiciously in an alleged suicide, falling from a building in New York City.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Zanele Muholi, courtesy of the artist and Stevevson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

Talk with Zanele Muholi 

Wednesday, March 12, 2014, 7:00 p.m.

Zanele Muholi is a photographer and self-described “visual activist” dedicated to addressing social injustice, particularly issues of race, gender, and sexuality. She is best known for her photographic series Faces and Phases, which portrays black members of the LGBTI community in South Africa and around the world, and seeks to displace stereotypes of black female sexual identity as intensely sensual and exclusively heterosexual. Muholi’s work and activities also include documentary films, writings, beadwork, and the organization Inkanyiso, which gives visibility to conditions that lesbians of color confront in South Africa and works to create change.

SFJAZZ Center
201 Franklin Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

$10 general; $7 SFMOMA members, students, and seniors. Tickets available at sfjazz.org.

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Carlos Motta, Deviations to Love #7, 2013; digital projection, courtesy of Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon; Instituto de Visión, Bogotá; Y Gallery, New York

Symposium: Visual Activism

Friday, March 14, 2014
9:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Saturday, March 15, 2014
9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Brava Theater Center, San Francisco

Chimurenga Library, An introspective of Chimurenga Magazine, Cape Town Central Library, 2009

Collaborative Intervention: Chimurenga Library 

May 24 – June 29, 2014

Discover new stories in the stacks of the San Francisco Public Library through this project by Chimurenga, a Cape Town collective focused on Pan-African history and culture. In addition to publishing, music, and Internet radio ventures, Chimurenga has created interventions in libraries ranging from the large City of Cape Town library to the small Keleketla community library in Johannesburg. In San Francisco, they are creating a simple system that allows browsers to connect various items in the library in a way that generates different narratives, with a focus on the participation of African American artists, writers, and performers in Pan-African festivals of the 1960s and 1970s.

San Francisco Public Library
100 Larkin Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

Free and open to the public.

www.sfmoma.org