storm janse van rensburg on kaganof
I met Kaganof in 2002, when he presented a performance installation at the NSA Gallery in Durban. During this time he lived in the gallery for a period of three weeks. Locked in every night from 5pm until 7am the next morning, Kaganof spent every night inside the empty gallery space, writing with a black marker on the wall, which resulted in an endless stream of consciousness that was part poetry, part autobiography, part fiction, and often obscene.
As the exhibition continued, the writing became thick and black on the gallery walls, and every morning when I entered, was bombarded with the inside, peculiar scribblings on the wall, which circumscribed the entire ground floor of the gallery, and snaking up the staircase. Every day something new.
This graffitti was an extension of writing that Kaganof did compulsively in tiny little notebooks that he carries with him - miniature sentences that often became disjointed and disrupted, that crept and crawled over the page to form patterns and textures, essentially becoming images. When I asked Kaganof about these notebooks, and the relationship between these and his poetry he confessed that he does not use these little notebooks much anymore, that the urge and need to make sense of the world through and in between these ink blotted pages has largely subsided, to quote a Dutch phrase by Kaganof: “The writing is afgelopen” - a translation could be : “the writing ran out of steam.”
The poems contained in the anthology entitled Jou Ma Se Poems, and also in the six other collections of poems published by Kaganof, germinated from these notebooks and the word installation at the KZNSA, and is in some form or the other related, but reworked and also maybe cleaned up.
Aryan Kaganof is a multi faceted and eloquent artist who produces prolifically - internationally renowned as a film maker, writer, producer, artist, philosopher, and publisher, with an ever enlarging and rapidly increasing filmography and bibliography. An auteur extraordinaire, Kaganof mixes, regurgitates and recycles his work, as if all part of the same continuum - his work is all part of a connective process that he revisits and reworks until he has drained all possible juices from a subject - a constant interrogation of word and image.
The work contained in most of his written publications is often autobiographical. But here is evident the larger ever present work of Kaganof - Kaganof himself. a carefully considered and crafted entity. Kaganof in his official biography notates this creation as follows and I quote:
“Kaganof was born again in Randburg on 28 March 2001. He founded the Abraxas Younity Movement in Hout Bay in 1999. He is the artistic director of the African Noise Foundation, lead vocalist and lyricist of the post-dub ensemble Freedom Fighter and CEO of Die Kaksusters. Kaganof was co-founder, with Frank Scheffer, of the Sonic Arts Ensemble (Merzbow, Tomoko Mukaiyama, Philipp Virus). Their manifesto “The Digital Future Is Now” formulates a position for digital art and technohybridization movements in the new millenium. Kaganof studied at the Netherlands Film And Television Academy, majoring in screenwriting and direction. He works in many media, drives Valiant and shoots Glock.”
The personality is ever present and permeates Jou Ma Se Poems and other work - the author is a constant reference, and the act of writing itself a leitmotif. A recurring thematic string is a brooding violence, that occasionally erupts in the pages, and often with the author as aggressor. It is no more evident in Foreword” in this publication (also reproduced on the back sleeve) where these elements come to the fore,
A part of you is murdered
when you read my poems
a part of me is sacrificed
when i write them
Storm Janse Van rensburg
(all photos by guto bussab)
