In this video, the artist excavates collective memory and exclusionary national myth,  rebuilding both in new ways to create a world where the exiled can reign. The result is a land of many queens, lost and found and forgotten.  In a collaboration with South African artist Angel-Ho, a disjointed track of Brenda Fassie’s ‘Weekend Special’ plays, paying homage to the late pop idol, along with other iconic figures such as Steve Biko, Nonqawuse and Winnie Mandela.

Born in 1984, Athi-Patra Ruga is a South African artist who uses performance, photography, video, textiles, and printmaking to explore notions of utopia and dystopia, material and memory. His work has adopted the trope of myth as a contemporary response to the post-apartheid era. Ruga creates alternative identities and uses these avatars as a way to parody and critique the existing political and social status quo. Ruga’s artistic approach of creating myths and alternate realities is in some way an attempt to view the traumas of the last 200 years of colonial history from a place of detachment – at a farsighted distance where wounds can be contemplated outside of personalized grief and subjective defensiveness.