Chipo Chipaziwa explores the concept of home and the white gaze in Slipping Into Slipping Away

In her new performance piece, artist-in-residence at Western Front plays with power dynamics between art worker and the public, archivist and archived

By Gail Johnson

Chipo Chipaziwa. Photo by The Daily Composition/Yoon Sook Cha.

Western Front presents Slipping Into Slipping Away from November 14 to 16 at 7:30 pm

THE CONCEPT OF home is something that profoundly influences local performance and visual artist Chipo Chipaziwa. Born in Malaysia, she lived there for six years then moved to Switzerland for seven years, New York for four, and did her last year high school Zimbabwe. With a father who was a diplomat, she came to Vancouver in 2015 to attend UBC, where she obtained her degree in visual arts. This past April, she became a Canadian citizen.

“I do think that I am coming to a place where I’m starting to treat my body as my home,” Chipaziwa says in a phone interview with Stir. “I’m welcoming that idea.”

Chipaziwa recently published a book called My Mother My Home, which looks at the white gaze on Black life, art, and being. It explores five years of her past performances without any photographic depictions of her body. Instead, she relies on the written word—with texts penned by herself, as well as by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Olumoroti Soji-George—and on art: paintings, drawings, and prints by Margaret Joba-Woodruff, Sophia Lapres, and David Ezra Wang.

“The book was me just giving myself the task to see if I could archive my performances without any literal depictions of my body,” Chipaziwa explains.

The book is a jumping off point for Slipping Into Slipping Away, her new performance piece as artist-in-residence with Western Front. Taking place on the ground floor of venue, Chipaziwa’s performance will play with the power dynamic between the art worker and the visiting public, and the archivist and the archived. The intimate 30-minute performance will unfold in Western Front’s reception space with a capacity of 30 audience members each night.

One of the performances that she revisits in her book is called Chipo Chipaziwa Artist Statement and in it, she reflects on her experiences as a Black student at UBC, and what those four years meant to her. It originally took the form of an embodied lecture that was performed in an actual classroom, and it was part of the 2019 grad show. “I revisit that script as present-day Chipo,” she notes.

“I have kind of a diary entry on a performance that I did called Notes on Beauty, and I really think about a Black woman’s relationship with beauty and how it’s a really complicated one,” she says. “I think about how my own personal experiences of not thinking that I’m beautiful and about how a Black woman is considered beautiful—what are the parameters around that, and one day hoping I’d be accepted into that narrow box.

“I know that I’m going to get older, and I do think that performance artists, especially women, are still continuing to perform as they get older, but the body that I have at this current moment in time can be considered desirable and I will ultimately age out of that. I will get put in a different box and that’s out of my control. This practice of me reflecting on my performances at the five-year mark I do see myself doing again. Maybe it will be the next five years or 10 years. It’s something I want to continue doing. This is the first chapter of this process of me reflecting.”

Ultimately, Slipping Into Slipping Away is about the fluidity of identity.

“I feel like everything I do will I will always think about me being Black woman,” she says. “Being Black is not a monolithic experience, and I can only speak about my experience. It’s a very personal piece for me and I’m both scared and really excited to share it.” 

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