Imagined states: law and literature in Nigeria, 1900 – 1966

in South Africa. Katrak pertinently aligns the interventions and cross incubatory impulse of Pather’s curatorial projects (such as “Infecting the City” in Cape Town) with the performance research fostered by, for instance, the GIPCA (Gordon Institute for performance and Creative Art) “Great Texts/Big Questions” events which bring together scholars and artists from various fields. In Chapter 5, “A New Kind of Performance—Curation of Live Artists,” Katrak shares the abundance generated in the conception and creativity that Pather mentors on these performance platforms. Key to Pather’s vision for Live Art and Public Art is the questioning of the reception of performance events. For him, these performance insertions are about “unlocking communal spaces and giving ordinary citizens access to extraordinary art” (Pather qtd on 302). This chapter begins to pose urgent questions around what Pather identifies as the “limit of forms” in his essay entitled “The Impossibility of Curating Live Art” (2019)—the “death of the curator” (329). Pather seems poised to re-animate “new directions” for Live Art or to keep instilling a turbulence for change, captured in his words, “the curation of anarchy or crisis is a contradiction in terms” (Pather qtd on 325). This text invites the reader to absorb both the mysterious and magical aspects of Pather’s vision; to conjure up stirring practices of freedom both in the name of and in resistance to somatic thresholds that continue to retain an ambiguous presence which becomes visible, not only in performance art, but also in the lived power struggles that are enacted daily on bodies in a still revolting South Africa.