Documentary by Kershan Vikram Pancham launched at Institute for Creative Arts Online Art Festival

In May 2020, the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) based at the University of Cape Town (UCT), launched an Online Fellowship Programme to contribute tangibly to artists' and researchers' career trajectories at a moment when art funds are dwindling, as well as to emphasise the critical role that the arts have to play in a time of change and uncertainty – the COVID-19 global pandemic. The invitation and aim during a COVID-19 closure was to imagine ways of opening experiences of live art, typically performed in person and in public gatherings, online.

ASCL PhD candidate Kershan Vikram Pancham was one of the 34 fellows that were appointed and invited to re-imagine an existing artwork for digital interaction. Kershan produced a work entitled Two Boy Ogres and an Old Bird, and describes it as an online interactive documentary, set in a Zoom world. 

Kershan says they were guided by a few questions: ‘What constitutes online art, beyond mere uploads of recorded live art? What could online digital, live, performative art be? How may the digital be used to create space and place for public art?' They responded by drawing on their own personal archive of materials gathered from their activism over the years, and wrote a fresh new short story that was read by artist and writer Cynthia Ayeza. 

'Two Boy Ogres and an Old Bird offers voice for public memory, witness, and queer love. It draws together histories that matter which appear disparate, but are connected and equally important. Those of Sarah Baartman and Uyinene Mrwetyana in the Cape, an ant in KwaZulu-Natal, the Alp mountains and sky in Europe – and Two Boy Ogres with an Old River Bird, everywhere. It is a story of queer and feminist trust, writing for us that neither is free without the other, each of us is bound to each other. Also, it shows the only footage of the de-lettering of Sarah Baartman Hall at UCT.  A moment that was sanctioned to be excluded from the historical record, but which I place into the trust of public memory through this work,' says Kershan.

It is based on the reimagining of Kershan's 2019 artwork Critical Intimacy and Oceans, in the Grave of a Tree, for the ICA’s Live Art Performances, funded by ProHelvetia. Critical Intimacy deals with themes of witness, heritage, memory, enslavement, indenture, voice and queer love. Both works are threaded by Critical Race Theory and Black Radical Tradition work of Sylvia Wynter. Specifically, Wynter’s concept that ceremonies must be found, made and performed that re/pair, heal and grieve and return life to the injustices of the past. 

'I wrote this story of Two Boy Ogres and an Old Bird, which holds the voice of these histories, and futures, together. It is an offering to keep coming back to - this story of queer and feminist politics - as we work to understanding endings of violence, and the insistent continued turns to beauty, freedom and love,' offered Kershan.

Watch Kershan Vikram Pancham’s new online interactive documentary.