2018 ICA Live Art Festival to showcase over 40 works

The fourth Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) Live Art Festival will be held at several venues across Cape Town from 1-16 September 2018. The live performance festival is set to showcase a collection of over 40 works of visual art, dance, music, and literature.

16 Aug 2018

Lorin Sookool - photo by Gerome Stoffels courtesy of ICA Live Art Festival

This year, the festival will focus on the development and histories of live art and will feature a number of artists who connect contemporary live art with classical African tradition. As visual and performing arts and traditional practices intersect with the social and political themes of our time, the featured pieces will challenge the experience of live art and open up a space for dialogue.

Free your imagination

The free and public nature of the ICA Live Art Festival is vested in a commitment to the value of contemporary live art as a means of facilitating encounters that encourage people to think and feel about a range of important issues in new and different ways.

Athi-Patra Ruga - 'Miss Azania' - Photo courtesy of the artist and ICA Live Art Festival

ICA director and University of Cape Town (UCT) associate professor Jay Pather says: "The struggle for intimacy and identity in today's world is apparent all around us, and this year's ICA Live Art Festival speaks to this struggle, grappling with some of our deepest ideas, fears and visions of what society is and could be. As a global community, there is an urgency to rethink and reimagine our strategies for surviving continued pervasive crises that confront our natural environment, political stability, and social relations. The ICA Live Art Festival prompts us to see and think differently, offering audiences the tools to ditch their discretion and free their imagination.”

"We invite the people of Cape Town to join us in experiencing this powerful array of experimental and often transgressive artworks in the risk-taking, non-commercial environment that the festival provides," adds Pather.

The festival will tour several public venues including UCT, the Iziko South African National Gallery, Iziko South African Museum, the Iziko Planetarium, Zeitz MOCAA, Luxurama Theatre, the Maitland Institute, and various spaces in the city centre: the Cape Town Train Station, the Company's Garden, the Castle of Good Hope, Erf 81, and the Central Library.

For more information, visit www.ica.uct.ac.za.