August - November 2021 — Performing Arts

Kieron Jina works in the fields of performance art, choreography, theatre-making, and video art to tell stories that are underpinned by activism, explore societal themes and challenge stereotypes to captivate, activate and alter audiences’ minds. He works in a multi-layered way, and his point of departure when making new work is his immediate environment, which acts as a web to capture issues around culture, history, and identity.

During his residency HOME IS MOVING (working title) at Kaserne Basel, Kieron aims to research and create a project that engages with the complexities of people and their relationship with each other and with place, both public and private space. He is interested in exploring the elements that suggest connection and their resulting tensions.

Kieron’s artistic research expands across various performance practices that focus on black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC). Kieron is particularly interested in the challenges and complexities of the transitional millennial generation — a generation that experienced the end and fall of apartheid only to be flung into a country still grappling with its own trauma and healing. Kieron explores the shifting identities of queer people, a group that features centrally in his work.

BIOGRAPHY

Kieron Jina is a multidisciplinary artist, dancer, choreographer, video artist, researcher, facilitator of creative process and lecturer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Kieron has an MA in Art from Wits University. His interests include Afrofuturism, migration, identity, sexuality, gender, new technology, immersive and site-specific performance, collaboration and interdisciplinary creative practices. Kieron has been included in the M&G Top 200 Young South Africans in the Arts and Culture Category for performance art in 2012, and was awarded the DanceWeb scholarship at the ImPulseTanz Festival in Vienna. Kieron has won multiple awards including the Ovation Award for choreography at the National Art Festival of South Africa & the Goethe Coproduction fund to create DOWN TO EARTH at Tanzfabrik in Berlin. He has completed residencies that lead to collaborative performances in Brazil, Germany, Austria, France, Reunion Island, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Korea & Switzerland. Kieron is the founder & curator of Queer Art Night South Africa and is currently touring with #FEMMEINPUBLIC, PAUSE and PINK MONEY. Kieron has been selected as a participant for the Berliner Festspiele Theatertreffen International Forum in Berlin, and created a new work titled PAUSE for William Kentridge’s Centre For The Less Good Idea in Johannesburg. Other recent collaborative interdisciplinary creations include INTERTHREAD for Infecting the City Festival in Cape Town, and CATCH FEELINGS, NOT FLIGHTS developed during a residency at A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town. In 2020 Kieron completed two new online performances entitled CHAMELEON HOME for Die Irritierte Stadt Festival in Stuttgart and FLAMBOYANCY: FIND YOUR WAY BACK for Eco Electro Queer Garden Party in Zurich.