Nicola Laure al-Samarai

I Make Art restages John Baldessari’s I am Making Art (1971) following his 1970 Class Assignments (Optional) to ‘Imitate Baldessari in Actions and Speech. Video’.  Baldessari’s gestural playfulness, copied, repeated and appropriated by a South African woman artist, becomes a strained signifier of accumulated otherness in its repetitious shorthand indexing of Western art categorisations: I Make African Art, I Make Contemporary Arab Art, I Make Craft, I Make Feminist Art, I Make Performance Art, I Make Digital Art, I Make Protest Art, I Make Interdisciplinary Art, I Make Deconstructive Art.