Garish Queerness as a Mode of Restoration in Pierre le Riche's New Show @ Ronewa Art Projects in Berlin

In Pierre le Riche’s current exhibition, In Four Places at Once, the artist creates vivid figurative wall tapestries that center his queer identity while reflecting on the complexities of belonging in a contemporary world. Identity is woven into and essential to le Riche’s practice; much of his work has been aimed at challenging norms and associations around gender and sexuality and confronting themes of colonialism and white privilege. The group of artworks on show emerged from a period of internal struggle as le Riche acclimatized to a new environment following his move from Cape Town to Aachen, Germany. In this light, le Riche’s choice of tufted yarn as a material, reminiscent of cozy household textiles, feels fitting to conjure a homesick state of yearning and introspection. Le Riche’s use of craft – elsewhere in his practice he also employs embroidery, sewing, and crochet – tosses out outdated notions of gendered art forms. Through his homoerotic content, le Riche pushes back against the conservativeness of a middle-class, suburban upbringing in Post-Apartheid South Africa. His cartoonish nude figures, some sporting exaggerated genitalia, can be read as playfully provocative and unapologetically gay, testing the boundaries of puritanical sensibilities. Simultaneously, his characters are contorted and dislocated in space, imbued with vulnerability, uncertainty, and longing.

In Four Places at Once is on view through March 28th at Ronewa Art Projects, Potsdamer Str. 91, 10785 Berlin.

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Who is Dope Saint Jude? For one thing, she is subversive: a self-produced black queer woman from South Africa who is breaking into the cis-male dominated hip hop scene. She is cool: tattoos, leather, glitter on her lips; she has guys on gold chains in her music videos, and next week she is flying to France for the second leg of her tour. She is revolutionary: using hip hop and mad aesthetics as a means to talk about queer visibility, the politics of the brown body, the radical act of self-empowerment. Dope Saint Jude drinks coffee with you, talks about going back to school to legitimize and expand her political consciousness. Days later, you are sharing a joint and dancing at a party for which the theme is “70s DISCO, BLACK EXCELLENCE, and INEVITABLE SHINE.” In essence, Dope Saint Jude resists clean definitions. She is multi-faceted and she expands to include narratives we don’t normally read together. Click here to read more.