god as a boy by Kopano Maroga, Jesse Navarre Vos & Yonela Makoba

god as a boy is a collection of artistic works created and initiated by Kopano Maroga to remember the holiness of their own body and how it extends (and acts as a testament) to the holiness of other bodies like it. That divinity does not belong only to the most dominant interpretations of its likeness. And, that: anything we love can be saved – Alice Walker. This piece is the result of Maroga’s MA research project into critical fabulation, biomythography and disidentification as tools for a creative practice, or a research into the feeling of “I am heartbroken over the splintered history of my life and I would like to imagine it whole again”.

This exhibition is a tribute to their creative relationship with Jesse Navarre Vos and Yonela Makoba, with whom they worked on a short film and photography series. god as a boy is the title of this show and short film, but also of the last poem in Maroga’s poetry book Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations. The publication’s focus was to shed light onto the queer black femme and trans experience in South Africa, all the while relating it to Christian texts that Maroga re-imagined through their personal experiences.

Kopano Maroga is a South African performance artist, writer and cultural worker. They live in Brussels and are a curator and dramaturge at the Arts Centre VIERNULVIER in Ghent. Their interests lie at the intersections of art, wisdom traditions, queerness, decolonisation, sex and sexuality and general faggotery.

Jesse Navarre Vos is a filmmaker and photographer based in Cape Town, South Africa. His academic background is in anthropology, history and music, which he uses as a basis for approaching film and photographic projects. Collaboration forms the foundation of his approach to creative endeavours. The use and interaction of sound, narrative and visual imagery are all equally important facets in the work that he plans to create.

Yonela Makoba was born and raised in the Eastern Cape, Mthatha. In 2012 she relocated to the Western Cape to study at the University of Cape Town. Upon completion of her undergraduate degree in Environmental and Geographic Science, she began working as an artist. The now multidisciplinary artist began her career as a fashion and hair stylist and has since ventured into fine art photography, performance art, sculpture, video art and printmaking.