The protagonist in Ben Lerner’s novel ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’ (2011) is obsessed with what he calls “profound experiences of art” — how other people seem to so easily “break into tears” as a result of being moved by things of utmost beauty. I found myself wondering about the impact of art as I stood…
Finding its articulation in the space of intimate narratives, moments and milestones, KWENZEKILE sits in meditative celebration of — through visual archiving and witnessing — the journey and progress the artist and individual, Sinalo Ngcaba, has endured and moved through. Her testament that indeed, kwenzekile. With works produced in oil pastel on paper, Sinalo’s KWENZEKILE, began…
In July this year, I went to see a group show at blank projects called, The weight of a stone. The first thing I saw was a small bundle of red, suspended in the middle of the room. It was tied with a rope that stretched across the length of the gallery, connecting to a…
Curated by Joburg and Paris based multidisciplinary artist, composer, DJ and producer, MO LAUDI —Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape — Globalisto. A Philosophy in Flux, is a group exhibition of 19 artists, activists, philosophers, change-makers, storytellers and poets interconnecting Africa and its diaspora — spanning from Cameroon to Egypt, Gabon, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania…
If indeed — as American radio personality Ira Glass proposes — great stories happen to those who tell them, then Lukhanyo Mdingi is a phenomenal chronicler. His exhibition, The Provenance (Part I), presented at The Fourth Gallery in Cape Town is a freshly penned tale of connected and interconnecting loci; of the intersection between mediums,…
The “party” is about a moment of suspension. Feeling a rigorous sensation in the body, a pulsating tip-to-tip… Like pins and needles all prickly across the skin’s surface and a slow numb that calls attention to each beat of the heart, harder and harder. And the Sensation, conjured by this dance, is void of history,…
1957 was the year the first African state won independence from colonial rule. To place that in context, my father was born then. In the 65 years he has been alive, three generations – including mine – have come into existence, yet post-independence Africa reads from an unchanged script. It goes like this: election year…
COVID-19 changed our relationships with the spaces we live in, in ways we can’t imagine. For the first time in many of our lifetimes, we witnessed the whole world forced to cave in, and retreat into internal spaces. Some, safer than others, retreated into their homes. Many realised they retreated into somewhat of a safe…
If millions of personal hours are poured into circulating a cultural phenomenon, how do we trace its authorship and — perhaps more importantly — its transformation? When is something appropriation versus translation, interpretation or simply scamming? In a roundtable printed by Artforum in the summer of 2017, scholar Homi Bhabha gestures at a slight but…
We Still Insist is a film project and live performance presented by The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember and What’s Wrong With Groovin’? A visual and audio archive installation that speaks to the history of oppression, resistance and liberation throughout Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century, We Still Insist, is…
“The home garden also becomes a space of domestic labour of pleasure. The domestic becomes the site of productivity but also of leisure and enjoyment. The garden, therefore, becomes a space of claiming the power of the domestic, of intimacy and home-ness.” — Ejaridini, MADEYOULOOK The garden evokes ideas of growth, renewal, cultivation, care, and…
“I am especially interested in how we navigate different ideas of the auntie: as bio-kin, as fictive kin, as anti-kin, as ante-kin, as employer, as older stranger, as authority figure, as someone else’s memory, as absence, and as possibility.” — K’eguro Macharia Through her multidisciplinary and multi-temporal project, Thandiwe Msebenzi introduces us to the story…
