Biography
Order of Ikhamanga in Bronze 2026 recipient, Gavin Krastin is a South African performance artist, curator and educator whose practice operates at the intersection of live art, scenography and interdisciplinary performance. Working across theatre, installation and durational performance, his work investigates the body’s relationship to materiality, space and political histories, often through site-responsive and process-driven performance environments.
Krastin is the founder and director of the Live Art Arcade, a nomadic platform supporting early-career artists working in experimental live art across South Africa. Established in 2018, the platform has become a significant national infrastructure for interdisciplinary performance practice, foregrounding durational exhibition formats, site-responsive work and alternative curatorial models. His curatorial approach emphasises adjacency, encounter and the public conditions of liveness as methods for generating artistic research and collective spectatorship.
As a performance-maker, Krastin has presented work widely across South Africa and internationally, including appearances at the National Arts Festival, ICA Live Art Festival (Cape Town), Buzzcut Festival (Glasgow) and Desenho de Cena (São Paulo). His performances frequently explore the entanglement between bodies and environments shaped by extraction, architecture and technological mediation, with particular attention to the performativity of materials such as metal.
Krastin holds a Master’s degree in choreography and performance and is currently completing a PhD in Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town, where his research examines the curatorial as artistic practice through the Live Art Arcade. In 2021 he received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art, recognising his contribution to contemporary live art in South Africa.
Synopsis
Heavy Metal is a double bill of two solo live art performances by Alan Parker and Gavin Krastin that investigates the intimate, political and material entanglement between human bodies and metal. Positioned between choreography, performance art, lecture-action and scenographic installation, the work asks what it means to live with metal rather than merely around it. It proposes metal not simply as substance or tool, but as collaborator, prosthesis, memory and infrastructure.
The project unfolds as a dialogue between two distinct bodily conditions: an able-bodied negotiation with gravity and effort, and a disabled negotiation with surgical intervention and internalised structure. Rather than staging opposition between these experiences, Heavy Metal situates them in adjacency. The performances operate as two trajectories through the same terrain, producing a relational field in which weight, lift, resistance and support become shared questions rather than individual attributes.
Alan Parker’s solo turns toward the metals already circulating within the body. Calcium, iron and trace elements become agents rather than abstractions. Through spoken text, repetition and increasingly demanding physical tasks, Parker confronts the persistent desire to leave the ground and the impossibility of doing so. The work moves between humour and exhaustion, speculation and insistence, staging gravity as both constraint and companion. Here, heaviness is not failure but condition. The performance asks what it means to aspire vertically in a fundamentally terrestrial body.
Gavin Krastin’s solo approaches metal through surgical implantation and disability. Following multiple spinal fusions, rods and screws now function as permanent internal architecture. These structures are neither purely supportive nor purely restrictive. They are thresholds through which movement must pass. Working with suspended corrugated steel, shifting light and durational action, Krastin constructs a metallurgical environment in which body and material continually renegotiate authority. Slow, ritualised gestures accumulate into a vocabulary of endurance, friction and adaptation. The stage becomes a site of smelting rather than representation, where the body is not depicted but re-forged in real time.
Together, the two works generate a shared spatial and conceptual field. They propose metal as a condition of contemporary life shaped by extraction, labour, medicine, architecture and technology. Metal is infrastructure beneath our feet, mineral within our bones and instrument inside the surgical theatre. It is also a political material deeply entangled with histories of colonial mining and industrial modernity in South Africa. Heavy Metal therefore operates simultaneously at the scale of the intimate body and the planetary substrate.
