ROBIN DINGEMANS
Delete White Male
Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.
– Noel Ignatiev
Delete White Male is a solo in which five exceptional artists – Harold Offeh, Hetain Patel, Marit Shirin Carolasdotter, Sean MacDonald and Arahmayani – have been invited each to delete the whiteness of Robin Dingemans. It turns the gaze on the Pākehā/white male as a problematic site. White men – the archetype oppressor identity – where much of the work of racial justice needs to occur.
Robin worked with each artist for up to five days weaving ideas and methodologies within a prism of practices and life experience of the performer, a partially decolonized Pākehā childhood sheltered by brownness and queerness in the toxic masculinity landscape of 1980s/90s rugby obsessed Aotearoa New Zealand, a country conversely considered far ahead in decolonialism; lived in diverse – Brexit burgeoning – London for 14 years, and since 2012 in Sweden – a place with a historically confident self-image but with a dark history and a polarized and segregated reality today.
Long from the faux fragility of cancel culture of men, the work is initiated with the desire of profaning, desecrating and antagonising of the white-straight-male-supremacy-iconising which the colonial matrix of power often perpetuates. Virtue signaling rejected, colonial shame embraced as positive and ventures into new territory such as becoming trans-taniwha, connecting to transformative energies, body, mind and soul.
Initiated & performed by Robin Dingemans
Composer: Aqqalu Berthelsen | Uyarakq
Lighting: Ronald Salas
Scenography: Anita Honart (with elements in collaboration with Tri Suharyanto)
Support and funding: The Swedish Arts Council, Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Stockholms stad, Weld, The Place, London, Wellesley Studios Aotearoa New Zealand, Yogyakarta National Museum, Indonesia, Kedai Kebun Forum, Indonesia, & Site Sweden.
HAROLD OFFEH (UK)
is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including Tate Britain and Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Turf Projects, London, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Wysing Art Centre, Studio Museum Harlem, New York, MAC VAL, France, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark and Art Tower Mito.
HETAIN PATEL (UK)
is a London based artist and filmmaker. His films, sculptures, live performances, paintings and photographs have been shown worldwide in galleries, theatres, and on iconic public screens including Piccadilly Circus, London and Times Square, New York. His works have been presented at the Venice Biennale, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing and Tate Modern, London to Sadler’s Wells, where he is a New Wave Associate. Patel’s work exploring identity and freedom, using choreography, text and popular culture appears in multiple formats and media, intended to reach the widest possible audience. His video and performance work online have been watched over 50 million times, which includes his TED talk of 2013 titled, ‘Who Am I? Think Again’.
MARIT-SHIRIN CAROLASDOTTER (Sápmi SE)
is a dancer and choreographer with Indigenous roots from Sápmi (Hotagen, South Sámi) in Sweden and from Kurdistan, Iraq. She is currently based in Umeå/Ubmeje, the northern part of Sweden, where she is working as a dancer, choreographer and artistic director for her network organisation Humans & Soil. She has been working in Japan since 2017 with research and performative practices, as well as performing world wide starting off her dancing career in Brussels 2015. She has an MA in International Performing Arts from SKH where she is working toward Indigenous bodily rights through activism, decolonizing choreographic methods, international collaborations and co-creation of the piece ”of itself : in itself” that had its world premiere at Norrlandsoperan in 2021, and toured with Dancenet Sweden in spring 2022.
SEAN MACDONALD (Aotearoa NZ)
has worked as a freelance contemporary dancer in Aotearoa for over 25 years. He trained at Auckland’s Performing Arts School (1991-1992) and Wellington’s New Zealand School of Dance (1994). He has been in association with Atamira Dance Collective since its inception in 2000, firstly as an audience member and then as a dancer/performer from 2006. He has performed in Maaka Pepene’s “Memoirs of Active Service”, Moss Paterson’s “Moko” tour to Beijing and Seoul, Kelly Nash’s “Ma”(Manaia Season) and “Atamira” and Gabrielle Thomas’s ”Tomo”. Sean is part of the cast of a major new Atamira work to be premiered in 2021 which re-imagines the 21 year body of the company’s work. As a choreographer Sean has also worked with the New Zealand Dance Company to create the family work ”Matariki for Tamariki”. His new work ”Ngā Wai” with Atamira premiered in November 2020 and will be traveling to Sean’s whenua Waimarama in 2021
ARAHMAIANI Arahmayani Feisal (ID)
is an Indonesian artist born in Bandung and based in Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia. Arahmaiani is considered by many to be one of the most respected and iconic contemporary artists, specifically in pioneering performance art in Southeast Asia. Arahmaiani frequently uses art as a means of critical commentary on social, religion, gender and cultural issues. Though best known as a performance artist, she also employs painting, drawing, sculpture, video, poetry, dance, and installation. The thematic material of Arahmaiani’s work deals with certain issues related to the discrimination and violence against women, the oppression of women’s bodies by men, religion in modern society, Western commercial imperialism, and global industrialization. Since the early 1980s, Arahmaiani’s works have generated hostility on the part of Islamic community leaders and political authorities resulting in her short imprisonment in 1983.