Episode 2
Listen to Episode 2 of The ICA Podcast, featuring an in-depth interview with Lesiba Mabitsela!
Lesiba Mabitsela is a South African artist and fashion designer whose practice incorporates performance, video, textiles, and immersive technology. His work critiques postcolonial perceptions of blackness, masculinities and the symbolic underpinnings of Western aesthetics and notions of beauty. Read more about Mabitsela’s practice here.
In this conversation with Lesiba Mabitsela, we move between Cape Town’s Grand Parade on Darling Street, the Company’s Garden and the studio to discuss Mabitsela’s performative works The Man in the Green Blanket (2015), Black Tie (2017) and Vet[ting]Men (2018), as well as his early influences and intersecting interests in fashion, masculinity and religion.
Lesiba Mabitsela, Vet[ting]Men, 2018. Photo by Xolani Tulumani
About the ICA Podcast
The ICA Podcast extends the work begun by the ICA’s 2019 publication Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa – through conversations with the creators and curators of Live Art. Read more about the vision for The ICA Podcast, and the artists featured in Season 1.
Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Podcast Addict, or wherever you find podcasts. You can also listen on our website.
Lesiba Mabitsela, Black Tie, 2017. Photo by Ashley Walters.
Looking ahead
In Episode 3, we'll be speaking to performance artist and activist Chuma Sopotela about her first foray into live art in 2007, her seminal work Inkukhu ibeke iqanda (2015), and her process of bringing new works into being.