The Fak’ugesi Digital Africa Residency was established in 2014 with an emphasis on supporting young digital practitioners from the SADC region and beyond. This year’s residency takes focus on the theme of the 2019 festival ‘OWN YOUR FORCE’. It “centers on an African vision of the future of digital creativity by asking; who owns our…
Curating is caring for the culture, above all by enabling its artistic or creative transformers to pursue their work. This facilitation is done, preferably, with empathy and insight, effectively, and with some style. – Terry Smith, 2015 Struts of steel intersect descending light-beams. Geometric in design, corrugated iron and crosshatched cubes reveal a cerulean sky….
Gold and glinting, an icon of triumph. Surrounded by murmurs of opening-night anticipation. Situated at the The Point of Order, Adrian Fortuin’s The Readymade, Made Ready stands proud, in wait. Guarded, as an emphasis of value, this social sculpture was truly activated when it was awarded, in a turn of events, to the maker himself….
Oupa L. Sibeko is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar who is known for his theatre, gallery and academic expression. The subject matter that he deals with is that of body politics, specifically the body as a “a site of contested knowledge”. The elements that come to the fore in his photographic work are personal in…
MOTHER IS A DRUM is a solo exhibition by Grace Cross at SMITH. The show deals with the birth of the artist’s child and the solemn epiphanies of motherhood. Making use of symbols in her paintings, the viewer is confronted with images of famished mouths, a woman with breast pumps–reminding one quite starkly of the…
In 2015, Amandla Stenberg (now a social activist, but back then of Hunger Games fame) put out a video on Youtube called “Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows: a crash discourse on black culture”. In the 4 minute video, Stenberg explains how privileged white society has been mining black culture for monetizable cool, while simultaneously…
The Counterspace Of Pop Culture In Zaire blends the worlds of augmented and virtual reality with visual language into a “multi-sensory digital art installation.” The show makes use of universal symbols, images extracted from culture and theatrical sound to give to its viewers a near mystical experience. The works on display become a commentary on…
Threads woven in colourways tracing invisible lives and histories. Worn well, treaded down by repetitive of footsteps of the past. The palimpsest of individual stitches concealed and covered. Painted over. Redacted. Embellished. Artist Sepideh Mehraban describes how, “to me carpets are objects that carry stories of people”. In a sense also using Persian rugs as…
There is a wealth of great cinema in the African canon that most of us don’t have access to or knowledge about. That’s not your fault. Many of these films don’t make it to the cinema or to your local DVD store or onto streaming platforms. Many of them are incredibly difficult to find in…
We miscalculate the effect of the mass media. Television – IT can act as a medium to explore, create, educate as well as nullify our observation. Consuming the “noise” from the screen is far from an innocent past time. It seeps into politics on both a personal and a collective level. How identity, the body…
Much has been debated about the role of art fairs in the art ecology – are they spaces of critical discourse and education or do they simply function as marketplaces where buying and selling takes place? The seventh iteration of the RMB Turbine Art Fair took place this past weekend (11th till 14th July) at…
Movement in Africa has always had a deep meaning, and this has influenced me to study the art of movement. Movement artist Wezile Mgibe employs modern visual performance and traditional ritual practice in dance–focused on healing. Wezile explains in his artist statement that “…Africans are interrogating some parts of ourselves with which we have been…
