Anthea Moys is a performance artist who goes looking for the accident waiting to happen. Accidents are of great interest to Moys, who videotapes herself as she tests her own limits enacting potentially dangerous situations in the process of play.
While an exchange student in Sierre, Switzerland, in 2005, the artist went for a walk alongside Lake Géronde and inadvertently slipped on some ice. Setting her camera up, Moys videotaped herself reenacting the slip, gradually overcoming her fears of hurting herself until finally she was flinging her body all over the ice, amusing passersby. The game ended when the back of her head hit the hardened snow and started to bleed.
Of course, there is a history of performance artists who have subjected themselves to almost unendurable pain, such as Chris Burden and Marina Abramovi´c, but for Moys endurance is not the point. Although initially having to overcome fear to play the game at all, that game can be halted when it is no longer fun. The key is the tension between lightheartedness and physical risk.
Back in Johannesburg to complete her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Moys increasingly invited others to join her in her performances. For her work Boxing Games (2007), for example, she trained daily for two weeks as a professional boxer would at the Rhema Boxing Club in Hillbrow and invented a game in which a blow of a referee’s whistle directed action. She then recruited eleven other boxers to play the game with her as a performance at a Saturday night event. The fast-paced, exhilarating but also challenging “pretend fight” involving all twelve players was recorded on video, and later in 2007 Moys staged the game again, on a rooftop in downtown Johannesburg.
Moys often addresses a sense of urban tension in her work, as in Guarded Relaxation (2007). Participants invited by the artist and the sponsoring organization, the Goethe Institute, were led into a grassy public space in the suburb of Parkwood. There they lay down on mats and, surrounded by five security guards employed by Moys to “protect them,” were asked to close their eyes as they were taken through a guided relaxation routine by an instructor. At the end, finally allowed to open their eyes, the group saw the guards were now lying on their backs on the grass, no longer in guard position.
While armed robberies do sometimes take place in Johannesburg parks, the paranoia that rules the lives of many in the city is extreme.
Moys’s playful and provocative work addresses this extreme fear and suggests creative and enjoyable strategies in opening oneself up to live more fully in the life of the dynamic and pulsing city of Johannesburg—and beyond.
Guarded Relaxation (1) 2007
20-minute performance, digital ink jet print
42 x 59.4 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
© Anthea Moys
Boxing Games Interruption (Stand) 2007
4-minute performance, digital ink jet print
42 x 59.4 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Alastair McLachlan
© Anthea Moys