Two Things Can Be True

 by Mosa Anita Kaiser  | 2019 |  5 min 10s  

Made in 2019, after three years of ongoing student protests across South Africa, intergenerational perspectives and questions about the formation of knowledge and human interactions are brought into proximity in the artwork ‘Two things can be true’.  The artist’s poetry, body, thoughts and movement are juxtaposed alongside and sometimes in confrontation to the excerpts of the life history narrative of the women academic who now occupies a mid-level management role. 

This artwork was made in response to a transcription and audio recordings of the life history narrative of an academic in a  South African university. In that narrative, the academic spoke of the knowledge she gained experientially and in addition to formal education, throughout her life. These included the trials and tribulations of her childhood, in a low-income household following her families diaspora from another African country; her negotiations of the politics of belonging and social networks within the social norms of affluent campuses in South African and the US; and her current sense-making as she enacts leaderships of a department with heterogeneous individuals, who are unprecedented within that historically white institution for being predominantly first generation academics..