My great grandmother would say to me, ‘I’m awake and your bedroom still looks like a kassaram, or this place is a kassaram.’ So that’s what I called the film because things are not as they should be the way we live is not right.” I don’t know if there’s a sort of ‘proper meaning’, but that’s the way we understood it. Through the use of vinyl, the exterior of the taxi is covered in stills from Petersen’s film, named Kassaram, a “Malay” word that Petersen says she understands to mean “when things are upside down, out of place, or things aren’t as they should be. The project was launched as part of Cape Town's (Un)Infecting the City festival. The taxi will continue its usual commute, covered in the artwork for six months. If it wasn’t for the taxi the work wouldn't exist,” Petersen explains. Because the taxi was my inspiration in the first place. And I thought, How can I get this to be seen? And then I thought, well, the taxi makes sense. “After I made the film I thought, ‘okay, so the film is going to the Smithsonian in Washington…It’s here, it’s there’, but the place that inspired it has no access to it that made no sense to me, I felt uncomfortable.

It was her latest video art piece that sparked the idea to make her work accessible to the thousands of taxi commuters who might otherwise not see it. Her practice, which incorporates photography, video, performance and multimedia installations, tackles issues of identity, often referencing cultural and religious practice among Muslims, as well as South Africa’s “coloured” or “Cape Malay” community, both terms she doesn’t consider to be appropriate in identifying what she proposed should be called a “creole community”. Self-portrait 1, from the artist Thania Petersen's 2015 photographic series, 'I AM ROYAL' The 40-year-old artist’s work has been collected and exhibited widely, from the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town to the World Cultures Museum Rotterdam in the Netherlands to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, through to Brazil’s Oscar Niemeyer Museum Curitiba, to name a few.

Since the beginning of May 2021, one particular minibus taxi that traverses the route between Hanover Park and the Cape Town city centre has been covered in artwork by Cape Town-based artist Thania Petersen. © Copyright (c) Daily Maverick, All Rights Reserved

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