The text that is to follow- is the continuation of a conversation and speculations from a place of suspension, on the current and possible future implications of COVID-19 within South Africa’s creative and artistic industries with Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho of MADEYOULOOK. In the text that precedes it, titled Weighted suspension // conversations and…
“On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog’s bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men,…
Success is Everywhere, is an inspirational short film set in Cape Town. Created by British film makers under the London based creative production company SLOG FILMS, the film sets out to engage the city’s local creative and artistic scenes as well as to visually narrate the inspiring individual stories of the great young talents that…
Surveillance modes and technologies inform how we see ourselves, how we behave, and how we see others. Its ubiquity has penetrated the making of contemporary society, with these methods making us visible and visualised subjects. With this emphasis on rendering people visible, there is also resistance and manipulation of these methods in an attempt to…
Liminal figures lost in the landscape of the past. Broken on the battlefield. Tethered to temporality; Paul Emmanuel’s latest exhibition Men and Monuments at the Wits Art Museum features a series of site-sensitive anti-monuments. The Lost Men project started in 2003 when the Iraq War broke out and other personal moments of loss surfaced. The…
Gallery TINY, situated in the South Bronx aims to bring works from the Global South to New York City’s doorstep. The inaugural show opens this Friday (13 March) featuring photographic and sculptural works by Johannesburg-based artist, Jake Michael Singer. ‘The World is Already Happening’ is a kind of re-visiting of a body of work produced …
Pulling on threads from the UK, Mozambique, Sweden and South Africa, Lesela Collective is looking at the material narratives of the African continent by exploring the countless sequences embedded within the field of textiles. Creating a new archive that is keenly aware of the colonial legacy entwined with African textiles, Lesela Collective members Wacy Zakarias…
Experiential, experimental, and still unfolding… These are the words that come to mind when thinking about BadEase, a multidisciplinary project space and residency based in Johannesburg. Made up of three main elements – an in-house kitchen (Plump Kitchen), an online radio station (ChiNdanga! Radio), accommodation and exhibition space (BadEase Residency). A number of projects will…
It was Susan Sontag who remarked that ‘to live is an aggression’, speaking to the extent to which aggression operates as part of the normal rhythm of living. She notes; “You’re involved with aggression on all levels when you move around the world, you’re occupying space that other people can’t occupy, you’re stepping on flora,…
The Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF) has come and gone. Taking place over one weekend (14th till 16th Feb) and boasting over 21 000 visitors, it is a critical moment in the South African art calendar. Art fairs, like many markets across the world, are confronted with a crisis—too many fairs across too many…
In the entrance of Goodman Gallery Thabiso Sekgala’s Tiger, selected from his series Second Transition confronts visitors. The direct, firm gaze of the man photographed is softened by the fleece tiger beanie on his head, making him a figure that welcomes, but also introduces one to Sekgala’s thematic explorations of (in)visibility, ideas of home, belonging…
“The camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses”. Susan Sontag Long shadows cast along an urban landscape, pylons peppered between leafy silhouettes. The fog begins to set in as litter is tussled in the wind. Emptiness and occupation; a moment resisting the spectacle. Santu Mofokeng, is a name synonymous with decades…
