RAT WESTERN Artist's Portfolio

Rat Western is a South African multidisciplinary artist, performer, and academic whose work is primarily focused on digital arts, performance, and site-specific installation. Exploring themes of mythology, popular culture, narrative, hauntology, satire, and virtual media, her practice is occasionally collaborative, working with other creatives to produce immersive and/or interactive experiences.

Her artistic practice is rooted in digital technologies, including video, animation, sound design and interactive media. These media are frequently combined with analogue processes (drawing, sculpture, found objects, site-specific installation) and live performance to observe the contrast between virtual, ephemeral, time-based media, and the seeming permanence of real-world physical sites and objects. A research interest arising from this methodology is the comparison of the concepts of Authenticity and Sincerity with what appear to be their philosophical opposites, Fake and Forgery.  This was the central study of Western’s PhD entitled A Practitioner’s Guide to Faking It: Authenticity and Sincerity in South African Visual Culture.

Western has exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally in Florence, Dublin, Rotterdam, and Cardiff.  Having worked as a freelancer in advertising and arts journalism, and as a lecturer at Wits School of Arts and Vega School of Brand Design, Western is currently a Senior Lecturer in the department of Fine Arts at Rhodes University, where she is the section head of Digital Art.