Taboo Durag

Paul Maheke’s Taboo Durag (2021) is a performance work that explores the porous interface between vulnerability and resilience. A dance solo unfolds different narrative and choreographic registers with a score that swells up through bass-heavy ambience and vocals.

Created during the 2020 lockdown, the intensely personal work is rooted in the ways in which invisible, and yet sometimes very concrete forces affect our bodies as well as our identities and how we experience ourselves. These forces comprise everything from the political and social understanding of our history, to more mystical and spiritual understandings, as well as the sonic and inter-human and physical forces such as gravity that surround us.

Conveying a narrative around violence and acts of violence over other bodies, knowing that the audience will themselves carry their own personal histories, as well as their own cultural references, Taboo Durag utilises sound, text and movement to speak to themes of trauma and, in turn, healing, both as personal catharsis and as a way of reaching out to establish a form of touch, without physical contact.

Artist’s Statement

My practice is based on simple gestures that once consisted of placing works in public space. It has now expanded to video, sound, installation and performance.

The research is grounded in de-colonial and emancipatory thought with a focus on how history, memory and identity are formed and constituted. It considers the body as an archive, a territory with its own cartography, using its physicality as a pathway to information and meaning-making. This manifests more specifically in the performances as an investigation into physical memory.

Through a varied and often collaborative approach, I look at the ways in which alternative positions can inform and alter knowledge production.

Exploring with different presentation formats such as open discussions, staged performances or exhibitions, I delineate metaphorical spaces in which the body resonates with and echoes the broader socio-political context that has birthed it.

By combining several media and using feminist, post-colonial and queer voices my work intends to confront hegemonic thinking and explores peripheral discourses in order to address principles of dominance. It’s also a way for me to question social and geographical relationships to power.

With particular attention to dance, the performances and installations speculate on embodied stories and seek to re-articulate systems of representations that emerge from Western imaginations.

These works are often bathed in colourful lights and set in motion by pulsating soundtracks. They embrace a multiplicity of logics and voices: for instance, they can house a series of public events as well as other artists’ interventions; I regularly collaborate with music makers and producers, choreographers, performers and dancers.

I intend for the environments I craft to be experienced as poetic yet political spaces where the body is purposed as a site for resilience.

In the context of my exhibitions and performances, I consistently attempt to adjust the distance between the outside and the inside, the audience and my practice. The use of different forms of speech, words or elements such as curtains, window filters and metal railings, for example, play a significant role in their functioning: one of a permeable membrane or a fluid border that contains as much as it hosts — like in a body, most of my work relates to the idea of necessity and coexistence.

Commissioned by the Roberts Art Institute as part of Glasgow International. With the support of Bétonsalon (Research and Development)

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Conditions of Production

Where possible the work will be performed by Paul Maheke but future presentations of the work can be interpreted by a performer in accordance with the artist’s guidance.

Future performers do not need to be formally trained as dancers but should be able to perform the score accurately. The performer should be a person of colour and male identifying.

The Artist, or his representatives, must be consulted upon the hiring of each performer at least 30 working days before the performance takes place and must approve the choice of performer before they are hired.

The collector must provide the performer with a fee which aligns with the artists union recommendation. The performer’s fee must include a rehearsal fee.

The collector must cover all the expenses related to the performer’s travels, accommodation and per diems.

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Collectables

• The performance is offered as a unique work. The Artist will perform the Work at the acquirers request’s once within two years of the acquisition as part of the acquisition. Further presentations of the Work can be interpreted by a performer inline with the presentation requirements above.

• The collector will be entitled to the following

• A copy of the score
• Printed performance guidelines for the re-enactment of the work
• A framed silk-print on durag, edition 1 of 10
• A digital file with the soundtrack
• The rights to re-stage the performance in accordance with the guidelines and performance agreement
• The owner will be credited in all future materials relating to the performance

Equipment

• Speakers (×2 or ×4 depending on the scale of the space)
• 1 subwoofer