Nandipha Mntambo: The Flight


  • Nandipha Mntambo (photo by Between10and5)


Performance + Talk

  1. Feb 26, 2015, 5 – 6:30 pm
Level 0, Room B-04

As part of Harvard University's Black History/Art History lecture and performance series, South African artist Nandipha Mntambo debuts The Flight, an original performance in which the artist assumes the identity of a bull before and during a bullfight. Inspired by Miguel Torga's book Miura (2013), the work explores concepts of empathy, violence, and spectatorship while challenging the binary between human and animal. 


Nandipha Mntambo

Mntambo was born in Swaziland in 1982 and received her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2007. She is the recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2011 and her works have been exhibited museums and biennials across four continents, including the Dak'Art, the Smithsonian National Museum for African Art, the Moscow International Biennale, the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurst, and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. 

A brief question-and-answer session and reception with the artist follows the performance.

The Black History/Art History Lecture and Performance Series is generously sponsored by Harvard University's Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Center for African Studies, Harvard Art Museums, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Department of African and African American Studies, and Program in American Studies.

Agency for Critical Inquiry

Nandipha Mntambo: The Flight is part of the CCVA initiative Agency for Critical Inquiry, an open invitation to academic and Boston-area communities to connect with the Carpenter Center, forging a site for collective learning in the public realm.