Gugulective as Biopolitical Collectivism.

Gugulective is an art collective that has been at the forefront in the contestation of neoliberal capitalism in post-Apartheid South Africa focusing on the economies of place, space and race, and using the shebeen as the centre for its activist aesthetics. Installations and photomontages are the group's well-known signature media. However, an emphasis on these material aesthetic objects occludes the immaterial dimension of the group's collaborative projects. A focus on Guguctive's immaterial practices such as performances and discussions, which I call biopolitical collectivism due to their subject-centred and life-forming collectivist aesthetic praxis, reveals how the group contests the dehumanisation of black bodies in contemporary capitalism. This is particularly evident in projects such as Indaba Ludabi, Akuchanywa Apha, and Titled/Untitled in which the Gugulective confronts issues of place, space and race by deploying a cross-disciplinary and interstitial aesthetic practice which situates itself between the art institution and the non-artworld, between aesthetics and activism, the township and the city, the shebeen and the gallery, affects and the art object, art and life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]