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Video 8
Minette Vari
The Calling, 2003

The Calling presents a broken metropolis, created from personal and found historic footage, mainly of Johannesburg, but also of New York, Brussels and other places. It looks at what lies behind the human search for Utopia and plays these myths off against the harsh realities of survival in cities such as Johannesburg. The city is inscribed upon and enacted through the body. Both of these themes are exemplified in the video, in which Vári represents herself as part-monster, part-gargoyle and part-cyborg, engaged in a process of negotiating precarious terrain from an aerial vantage point in the midst of the cityscape. The use of her body suggests a sense of psychological trauma, in its transmutations into part-human, part-cyborg, part-archaic/mythological form. “I am interested in exposing strategies of representation by which systematic misreadings and fragmentations of identities occur. Not wishing to create new myths of homogeneity, I display slippages between truth and error in our dealings in and with culture” (2007).
Minnette Vári obtained her Masters Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Pretoria in1997and lives and works in Johannesburg. She has held one-person exhibitions in South Africa, Switzerland and the United States and has participated in numerous group exhibitions. She is an artist who plays with the world as we know it, waging a cool intellectual war on aspects of contemporary society which we take for granted, and turning them inside out. By simulating familiar structures and situations, then contextualising her simulations (or ‘decoys’) in ‘every day’ ways, she forces us to call into question our own attitudes and responses.

Keywords: David-Krut, Film, International, Minette Vari, South-African