Mlu Zondi
Exhibition & Residency:
January – February, 2011

Mlu Zondi creates performance indiscriminately for stage, gallery and public spaces. Reluctant to get caught up in the embedded politics of these charged sites, Zondi nonetheless engages with their respective audiences and publics, calibrating concepts and works for each particular context.

Zondi works under the banner of ‘Sololique Projacts’ (established in 2000 whilst still a student), a performance company with himself as principal member, incorporating other collaborators such as his partner, Ntando Cele, a poet and actor. Sololique Projacts has established an extensive repertoire of works, and as an ethos incorporates strong characterisation, playing on stereotypes and tensions of ‘otherness’, whilst developing an idiosyncratic performance language.

Zondi’s interest in making work in a visual arts context developed out of a sense that the contemporary dance world does not easily accept his brand of performance, and that in the early stages of his career, positive feedback and encouragement were mostly received from visual artists and practitioners.