What does it really take to survive as an independent artist?
Join us for a public panel discussion that confronts the often-unseen realities of independent artistic practice in South Africa. This conversation opens space to reflect on hidden labour, burnout, precarity, identity crises, and the systemic pressures that shape how artists live and work today.
Inspired by Tsholofelo Ndaba’s 24-hour durational performance I Think I’m No Longer an Artist, the panel invites artists, cultural workers, and the public into an honest exchange about survival, sustainability, and what it means to continue creating under increasingly demanding conditions.
📍 POPArt, Parkwood
📅 24 January 2026
⏰ 14:00–15:30
🎟 Free Entry
This is not a motivational talk.
It is a necessary conversation.
About the performance:
A 24-Hour Durational Performance / Living Installation I Think I’m No Longer an Artist is a 24-hour durational performance that lays bare the unseen realities of an independent artist’s life—the invisible labour, creative burnout, and the fragile line between identity and survival.
Rendered as a living installation, the performance unfolds through an endless cycle of doing and undoing, integrating action and inaction, movement and stillness, writing and administrative labour.
The work exposes what is rarely witnessed: endless emails, self-funded projects, prolonged waiting, institutional silence, and the ongoing struggle to remain visible in systems where presence often holds little value. The artist’s body functions simultaneously as worker and artwork.
Through sustained vulnerability and endurance, the performance invites audiences to bear witness not to a finished product, but to time, labour, and exhaustion as material. It asks viewers to sit with what quietly transpires while art is being made.
Ultimately, the work interrogates the precarious boundary between being an artist and servicing the machinery of art—and questions what remains when productivity outweighs presence, and doing eclipses being.
Conceptualised & Performed by: Tsholo4elo
Directed by: Jade Brown
