An Interview With...
Introducing the Hazendal Artist Label Series – Featuring Athi-Patra Ruga
Hazendal Wine Estate, one of South Africa’s oldest wine farms, launches its inaugural
Artist Label Series, blending winemaking with contemporary art. Curated by Khanyisile Mbongwa, the first edition features original label artwork by acclaimed South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga. This limited-edition bottle (only 1,500 made) captures the essence of Hazendal’s 2024 Festival, themed “Soil Edition.”
This exclusive bottle can be purchased directly from Hazendal Wine Estate’s website or tasting room, with 5% of proceeds donated to the Zeitz MOCAA, or from Museum Wines, the UK’s top South African wine specialist.
Your work often constructs alternate realities that feel both utopian and dystopian. What draws you to imagining these spaces, and what do they allow you to explore?
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I was raised in the ecstatic miasma of post- 94 South Africa, where a utopian ideal seemed within reach. As we know or rather my stance on utopia is that it has to mark bodies that are within it from those outside . My work is to then invent or re-member myths and lives that can fill in the gaps that art history has overlooked .​
Athi Patra-Ruga, 2018, Photographer Hayden Phipps, courtesy of Hazendal.
​Your visual language blends performance, fashion, tapestry, video, and more. How do you choose which medium best expresses an idea, and what are the benefits or challenges of working across so many different forms?
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The story I want to relay chooses the medium that I use to relay the stories- like a herb in the forest chooses the shaman herbalist . In addition my choice early on in my career where an exploration of the reach of the various media: live performance broke down the gates of who can view high art and who couldn’t; painting and photography is an expansion of the themes the live performance was born in, video also democratises performance as a click of a button can have it seen in the comfort of homes and classrooms . My latest series which is done in stained glass is based on using the phenomenon of light refracting on glass to bring the avatars in as a form of remembering.
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How do you approach the relationship between personal experience and broader cultural or social narratives in your work?
It is through a strategic clash. The strategy is to always speak of how my autonomous body has and continues to clash with sovereign status quo . And I use everything but the kitchen sink to get to showing that.
The body is central in much of your work. What is it about the body that makes it such a powerful vessel for storytelling, resistance, or transformation in your practice?
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I am a product of this world, its follies and aspirations . I find myself embodied in a world that has politicised my existence and in that confusion, my artist self has made it a goal to find out how to dream whilst interpreting the earthbound nightmares . As a figurative artist I am intent on increasing the body count depicted of members of my queer, black and femme community as to bear witness and further enforce the strong, generative contribution to civilisation .​
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Your wine bottle label carries the powerful vision that “freedom blossoms from within social constraints,” and features a mythological avatar. How did you develop this character?
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One of the focuses in my recent work is in the act of beatifying historical figures for the contemporary, as a way of re-membering my global artistic lineage and two self determined muses came to mind - Josephine Baker and Francoise Feral Benga, who in the 1920s were performers at the Folies Begere at the height of the Negrophilia , it was in this heady time space that I would mix elements from the Folies feather boas with that of Nguni ibheshu ( loincloth) and with the taste of the MCC and its long maturing process I imagine the figure as a seed/bulb gestating about to emerge . Another element was that of having the depicted costume being the texture that continues the bubbles. Inflame would be the word that speaks to a dance of life what that not only awakens the tastebuds but but also or curiosity to The Image.
ATHI-PATRA RUGA INDLAMU, 2024. Courtesy of Hazendal
What was the collaborative process like when working with the team to create this wine label?
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Upon invitation I proposed images that would suit the themes I was working with . This one was selected as it resonated with the curatorship and vineyards method of slow work, a value I resonate with. As the work was done by hand the art printing had to speak to the mark making and the bubbly textures that one experiences when holding the bottle.
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Your work is often large scale. How did you translate your artwork onto such a small, specific format?
All large works start with a small drawing . So, it was within my hand to control and subvert accepted ways of rendering labels .
L: Hazendal Wine Estate, November 2021, Photographer Sean Gibson, courtesy of Hazendal
R: Hazendal Festival Soil Edition, October 2024, Photographer Kaylin Petersen, courtesy of Hazendal