Tracey Rose Quotes

I stopped looking at art for a while, actually. It’s no longer this holistic thing that you’re looking at. It’s a statement. It’s about poverty, it’s about the global crises, post-colonial this, that. Tick box, tick box, tick box. It’s got all these fucking issues and I’m just looking at shit. There’s no kind of material engagement.

When you start to perform a particular character for the media or historians, you get locked into them. So even when you start writing, there’s no space for your words to be published. Now that I’m an academic, I can say what I like and write what I like. When I write what I like, it’s going to be fucken dangerous.

The work that I’m making happens, stylistically, because of all the financial restrictions that I have to go through in order to make it. Sometimes I hustle, I ask for favours. Sometimes I’m using a lesser kind of grade of material, but I know it’s like that because of the necessity of having the work made. That adds a richness to the work.

Musicians are respected, but only in the context that the music itself belongs to the community - not to the person who is playing an instrument or singing a song.

Computers and digital technology are becoming very important to African artists, just as elsewhere. I see it with the impact of hip-hop across the continent. You can see it beginning to have an impact on the visual arts.

There are more gentle ways to make art.

I don’t get why these kids think they’re the first. There’s a lacking in historical referencing and reverencing. Their art doesn’t take any risks. It doesn’t love itself. It doesn’t love people. It’s only interested in power; not even power, it’s all vanity. And I don’t think people are looking at books enough.

Let me explain. When I was young, I used to watch the fishermen by the banks of the Senegal river. They were working close to the desert in intense heat, and whenever they stopped working they would start to sing.

Making work is a documentation of a journey - each stage, each process, each dilemma has to be worked through. At one time I felt pressured to do a lot of things at the same time, but now I want to take one step at a time. When you make an artwork you're not just doing something at that moment, you're contributing to an entire history of artmaking.

In Podor, people sing naturally about their experiences, their lives and their relationships. It is not just musicians and singers who perform. Everybody has a part to play - even children are allowed to join in if they have the inspiration. It doesn't matter if your voice is not the finest; everyone is involved.

Artists have got to be the interpreters and intermediaries in spaces. So they consume information, they go into these vile, volatile environments and you take all of it. They reconfigure it and put it through their being and then they create these things that cause a shift vibrationally, spirituality, intellectually and emotionally for the people that engage with it. I am also a glutton for information. I consume information all the time. I read. It infiltrates the work.

I want to know how do I keep expanding what’s possible in the legal range with my body. It’s kind of theatre for adrenaline junkies. Once you start performance art, you keep chasing the dragon.

In Podor in Senegal, the place where I grew up, everyone is an artist because art in Africa is not a commercial enterprise but is part of life itself.

The performance that happens as an artist within that space becomes a political decision to keep the work alive, relevant and moving. If I didn’t I would be ostracised even more.

People from all over the world, who are the most rigorous thinkers, were making work out of stuff in real time. That’s not necessarily paint on canvas; it’s material and matter that speaks. It blew my mind. I cried for a year. I couldn’t. I had a breakdown because I realised the depth of the deception and how far and controlled it was. Seeing people of colour make art in my lifetime blew me the fuck away.