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The Arts Intel Report

Tracey Rose: Shooting Down Babylon

Dec 15, 2021 – Aug 28, 2022
V&A Waterfront, Silo District, S Arm Rd, Waterfront, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa

“People say my art is shocking,” the South African artist Tracey Rose has said. “But what’s happening in the global context is much more shocking than art.” Ever since Rose’s 20s—when her Ciao Bella, a feminist parody video projection of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, made headlines—she has created subversive reinterpretations of traditional masterpieces. Her subject is gender, race, and identity, and her oeuvre includes film, sculpture, photography, performance, print, and painting. In this, her largest exhibition to date, the central work is the installation Shooting Down Babylon, a reflection on colonial trauma and exorcist cleansing rituals in non-Western communities. —E.C.

Tracey Rose, “Die Wit Man,” 2015. Courtesy of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town.