Bettina
Malcomess
'don’t get it twisted: queer performativity and the emptying out of gesture'
Acts of Transgression (Pather and Boulle, 2019)
At an intersection in the Johannesburg inner city, a runner dressed in spandex bends down and enacts a series of provocative, erotic dance movements, as if on a nightclub stage. Inside a Pentecostal church near my studio, where I write this text, I have witnessed the exorcism of female congregants, their bodies convulsing while they speak in tongues, violently pulled and pushed by male priests, sometimes held by their hair. On Jeppe Street, transgender shop singers beckon to passersby to enter retail stores, hailing them in a register between song and speech on bass-distorted sound systems.
Where does a performance…
About Bettina Malcomess
Bettina Malcomess was a Live Art Fellow of ICA in 2017 whose work exists in a diverse set of media and forms, ranging from long-duration performances to the staging of shorter interventions, and installation projects to the book as practice. She produces performances under the name Anne Historical. Malcomess' writing traverses art, film, history, urbanism, and fiction. She lectures in the Visual Arts at the Wits School of Arts and has a PhD in Film Studies from Kings College, London.
