Tracey Rose

Tracey Rose (born 1974) in Durban is a South African artist who lives and works in Johannesburg. Rose is best known for her performances, video installations, and photographs. She attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where she obtained her B.A. degree in Fine Arts in 1996. She taught at Vaal Triangle Technikon, Vanderbijl Park, South Africa, and at the University of the Witwatersrand. In February and March 2001, she was artist-in-residence in Cape Town at the South African National Gallery, where she developed her work for the Venice Biennale 2001 curated by Harald Szeemann.

Tracey Rose

Quotes

"A feature on an artist in the public eye: Tracey Rose" (2001)

"A feature on an artist in the public eye: Tracey Rose", in Artthrob, no. 43, March 2001. Williamson, Sue. Retrieved 25 March 2025.

• I don’t get why these kids think they’re the first. There’s a lacking in historical referencing and reverencing. Their art doesn’t take any risks. It doesn’t love itself. It doesn’t love people. It’s only interested in power; not even power, it’s all vanity. And I don’t think people are looking at books enough.
• Artists have got to be the interpreters and intermediaries in spaces. So they consume information, they go into these vile, volatile environments and you take all of it. They reconfigure it and put it through their being and then they create these things that cause a shift vibrationally, spirituality, intellectually and emotionally for the people that engage with it. I am also a glutton for information. I consume information all the time. I read. It infiltrates the work.
• Making work is a documentation of a journey - each stage, each process, each dilemma has to be worked through. At one time I felt pressured to do a lot of things at the same time, but now I want to take one step at a time. When you make an artwork you're not just doing something at that moment, you're contributing to an entire history of artmaking.

"Art of Africa: The 50 best African artists" (2006)

Independent News and Media Limited, "Art of Africa: The 50 best African artists". 1 December 2006. The Independent. Retrieved 25 March 2025

• In Podor in Senegal, the place where I grew up, everyone is an artist because art in Africa is not a commercial enterprise but is part of life itself.
• Let me explain. When I was young, I used to watch the fishermen by the banks of the Senegal river. They were working close to the desert in intense heat, and whenever they stopped working they would start to sing.
• In Podor, people sing naturally about their experiences, their lives and their relationships. It is not just musicians and singers who perform. Everybody has a part to play - even children are allowed to join in if they have the inspiration. It doesn't matter if your voice is not the finest; everyone is involved.
• Musicians are respected, but only in the context that the music itself belongs to the community - not to the person who is playing an instrument or singing a song.
• Computers and digital technology are becoming very important to African artists, just as elsewhere. I see it with the impact of hip-hop across the continent. You can see it beginning to have an impact on the visual arts.

"More than one layer to the art and life of Tracey Rose" (2019)

Hlalethwa, Zaza (29 March 2019). "More than one layer to the art and life of Tracey Rose". The Mail & Guardian. Retrieved 25 March 2025.

• I stopped looking at art for a while, actually. It’s no longer this holistic thing that you’re looking at. It’s a statement. It’s about poverty, it’s about the global crises, post-colonial this, that. Tick box, tick box, tick box. It’s got all these fucking issues and I’m just looking at shit. There’s no kind of material engagement.
• The performance that happens as an artist within that space becomes a political decision to keep the work alive, relevant and moving. If I didn’t I would be ostracised even more.
• I want to know how do I keep expanding what’s possible in the legal range with my body. It’s kind of theatre for adrenaline junkies. Once you start performance art, you keep chasing the dragon.
• People from all over the world, who are the most rigorous thinkers, were making work out of stuff in real time. That’s not necessarily paint on canvas; it’s material and matter that speaks. It blew my mind. I cried for a year. I couldn’t. I had a breakdown because I realised the depth of the deception and how far and controlled it was. Seeing people of colour make art in my lifetime blew me the fuck away.
• I don’t get why these kids think they’re the first. There’s a lacking in historical referencing and reverencing. Their art doesn’t take any risks. It doesn’t love itself. It doesn’t love people. It’s only interested in power; not even power, it’s all vanity. And I don’t think people are looking at books enough.
• Artists have got to be the interpreters and intermediaries in spaces. So they consume information, they go into these vile, volatile environments and you take all of it. They reconfigure it and put it through their being and then they create these things that cause a shift vibrationally, spirituality, intellectually and emotionally for the people that engage with it. I am also a glutton for information. I consume information all the time. I read. It infiltrates the work.
• The work that I’m making happens, stylistically, because of all the financial restrictions that I have to go through in order to make it. Sometimes I hustle, I ask for favours. Sometimes I’m using a lesser kind of grade of material, but I know it’s like that because of the necessity of having the work made. That adds a richness to the work.
• There are more gentle ways to make art.
• When you start to perform a particular character for the media or historians, you get locked into them. So even when you start writing, there’s no space for your words to be published. Now that I’m an academic, I can say what I like and write what I like. When I write what I like, it’s going to be fucken dangerous.

Quotes about Tracey Rose

• Tracey Rose is not a practitioner who jumps at every curatorial opportunity offered her, and has been known to withdraw from more than one exhibition if the circumstances have not seemed right.
  • Williamson, Sue, "A feature on an artist in the public eye: Tracey Rose", in Artthrob, no. 43. Retrieved 25 March 2025.

• I first met Tracey Rose eleven years ago. I was researching the connections between healing and art in the work of contemporary artists from Africa. There was something in her art that spoke of the shaman, the alchemist, the revealer of wounds, the reorderer of worlds. From the beginning, I loved all the facets of her and of her work: the mischief and joy and delight of the girl; the boundless sensuality and wisdom of the woman; the vastness of spirit, placing her somewhere between this plane and another, channeling perpetually distant truths, some more gentle and others with more violent vibratory force.
  • DOCUMENTA 14 De, "Tracey Rose". www.documenta14.de. Nana Oforiatta Ayim. Retrieved 25 March 2025.

• Rose embodies various caricatures of beauty, from porn star Cicciolina to the European Queen, invoking those forms of masking and masquerade that in their grotesque heightening of contour, of color, of symbolism, reveal an essence usually hidden.
  • DOCUMENTA 14 De, "Tracey Rose". www.documenta14.de. Nana Oforiatta Ayim. Retrieved 25 March 2025.

• If we are to look at Rose’s career in the form of a linear timeline exhibiting important moments in the artist’ career, we see that her work is a threaded by essential fractiles through a landscape of powerful ideas, she is listening and responding to conditions. ^{[citation needed]}