WAITING IS AN ACTIVITY familiar to most, but in South Africa it carries a particular charge. In 1995, the country officially celebrated its first Day of Reconciliation, marking the supposed unification of its Black and white populations following the demise of the apartheid regime and in the wake of the first democratic elections in April 1994. It’s been twenty-eight long transitional years, and yet a truly egalitarian South Africa remains but a dream, as Black South Africans still face systemic subjugation in a white-dominated economy. This imbalance affects living conditions, quality of life,
The remarkable accomplishment of Andrea Fraser’s genre-defying career has been to meld the disparate domains of feminist performance and institutional critique, a maneuver assisted by the invention of fictional female characters, among them a museum docent, a news reporter, an artist, and a matron. In many of Fraser’s narratives, these personae, uncomplicated and guileless at first, grow increasingly complex as they deliver streams of facts and historical data that are the substance of the artist’s investigations. They might be earnest or comedic, polite or raunchy, but the discourses they