Cameos from the frontier

Whatiftheworld is proud to present Cameos from the frontier, a solo exhibition by Athi-Patra Ruga.

“In 2013, I began my journey with stained glass. I was drawn to the medium’s historical weight and its capacity for spectacle. I first approached stained glass as a medium through which to parody the constructs of the nation-state. This exploration began with an imagined story-world that riffed off the Pan-Africanist idea of Azania. My Azania was used as a satirical mirror, where traditional symbols like coats of arms, flags, and nationalist creeds could be transformed, exaggerated, and reconstituted into something that destabilised the nationalist narrative and revealed the agendas at play.

As my practice evolved, I began using stained glass in portraiture. Over time, the figures I render in glass have become more than representations; they are acts of self-invention and preservation. These characters stand in stark contrast to the saintly or institutional bodies that populate church windows or state buildings. Instead, they luxuriate in contradiction: avatars of excess, vulnerability, defiance, and fantasy.

This exhibition, titled Cameos from the frontier, deepens this exploration. The oval forms of these works echo the cameo. First appearing in classical Greece and Rome, cameos were used as personal seals, protective amulets, and devotional portraits showing loyalty to gods and political leaders. Later, they were used in courtship and as memento mori.

The cameo is simultaneously a memento, a fragment, a fleeting appearance, and a dispatch from afar. Each hand-painted piece becomes a physical container of memory and narrative, inviting viewers to reconsider the boundaries between ornament and monument, between portraiture and relic.

An inciting force in my pursuit of this form has been my travels through the historic Eastern Cape Frontier, the site of one the most sustained resistance to colonial expansion in Southern Africa. In this contested landscape, amongst other colonial ruins and battlegrounds one encounters Victorian Gothic cathedrals, many now decayed, destroyed, or abandoned.

Perhaps it is right to let them die? Perhaps it is also right to imagine something else in their place: new windows, new mythologies, new visions. My stained glass does not restore these structures, but instead futures them, projecting alternate inheritances into the cracks of colonial memory.

The lone avatars of this imaginary Azanian Frontier stand on the cusp of something curious and uncharted. The frontier, as both limit and possibility, is defined by unease, by the tension between danger and discovery. It is within this charged terrain that I adopt Gothic tropes, using them to articulate uncertainty, transformation, and the haunting persistence of the past.

Through my most recent body of work Cameos from the frontier, I am attempting to illuminate some of the complexities of heritage, identity, and my personal belief in the transformative power of making. In this way, stained glass becomes both critique and celebration, blending high craft with contemporary conceptual urgency.”