Friday, February 5

Julia Rosa Clark's Paradise Apparatus

Red ballet shoes en pointe, their ribbons attached to jars of pigments of every rainbow hue invited viewers to dance into Julia Rosa Clark's extraordinary fantasy world, 'Paradise Apparatus', which opened at Whatiftheworld Gallery on Wednesday night. Julia has always been the queen of the beautiful, or strange, small object en masse, found or fabricated, and this time she has outdone herself. There were two possible reactions to the space which glittered and gleamed with chains and mounds and drifts of hundreds of such objects: marvelling at the mind boggling number of work hours that must have gone into the planning and making, or sheer enjoyment of the total transformation of the gallery space. Picnic-like arrays of pale jellies spread themselves across the floor (moulded from Clark's discarded files and papers), fluted cones of paper tipped with turquoise surrounded the bases of columns, and were trampled on by careless opening night feet, and like a gorgeous chandelier, a circle of glass supporting vases and jars in jewel like colours was suspended from the ceiling. For more, check www.whatiftheworld.com/

Julia Rosa Clark's Paradise Apparatus

Performance art will get its three days in the Cape Town sunshine when Pre-Post-Per-Form, a colloquium which will bring together artists, academics, festival directors, curators, journalists and writers takes place at the Hiddingh campus of UCT from February 20 to 22. Under the direction of Jay Pather, participants include the iconic Mexican-American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Trevor Davies, director of the Metropolis Biennale, and writer Sarah Nuttall. For further information on Pre-Post-Per-Form visit www.gipca.uct.ac.za