At first glance one is drawn to the different facial expressions, the elaborate headdresses and the colourful collars adorned by the women portrayed in Lerato Motau’s Ten Thousand Women, her second solo exhibition currently on at AITY Gallery in Franschhoek. In this form of Black figuration, the artist employs embroidery as a form of painting….
In the words of Olivia Laing, “The future does not announce its arrival”. It merely takes its course. Tina Campt, of course, speaks of futurity realised in the present entwined with the notion of a “tense”— “a tense relationship to an idea of possibility that is neither innocent nor naïve. [That] is devious and exacting……
Some stories don’t have a clear beginning or clear ending. Instead, they seem to be inextricable from the depth of the middle. That’s the case with Mbali Khoza’s Native of Nowhere, displaying at C H U R C H Projects in Cape Town. I had the pleasure of sitting down with her for an iced…
It’s a thing, we’ve all done it or seen it before. We turn our backs to the camera as we glean meaningfully into the art on the walls of galleries. It’s like a gaze upon a gaze. Or, we turn our backs entirely, allowing sizable artworks to be our backgrounds, embracing us almost. Why do…
In episode 777 of the acclaimed podcast This American Life, in a conversation between two Black writers; Kiese Laymon and Zandria Robinson, Laymon asks an odd question: What kinds of death are we [Black people] owed when we leave home, or are carried from home for a different kind of freedom? People always want to…
I’m eating sushi in paradise with whoever (whoever) And loaded cause it don’t last forever The chivalry of whisky on her lips (it’s on her lips, it’s on her lips) She’s lost in the cars it’s the sound of her hips Brown people a night in Diepkloof Mansions You’re hanging with him cause he’s in…
If I had access to someone at the offices of Google or Meta, I would have asked them to track how many people — how many men — had snapped images of Lebogang Mogul Mabusela’s work, put it on social media with a hashtag and some random non-contextual remark without taking responsibility for their own…
The POWER Exhibition runs from the 5th to the 19th of August at Community ZA on 3 Millar Road in Durban. It is a spectacle that brings the curtain down on three days of talks supported by the Goethe Institut, regarding the state of the cultural economy in Durban. Niamh Walsh-Vorster, Director of the Contemporary Archive Project, co-curated the…
Following two years of a COVID-19 induced online existence, FNB Art Joburg will be taking place from September 2 – 4 at the Sandton Convention Centre again this year. As Africa’s leading and longest running contemporary art fair, FNB Art Joburg’s mandate is to sustainably support and grow the continent’s contemporary art market. In “Art…
Museum exhibitions are rarely warm — neither in the degree of heat nor homely reception — but as I entered the second floor of the grain silos at Zeitz Mocaa, a sense of warmth engulfed me. From the sweet and tangy smell of citrus in Thania Petersen’s Rampies Sny (2022), the tender voices recorded in Luvuyo…
There is ‘something’ liberating underscoring our relationship to, and fear of, time. Something co-curator Sumayya Vally describes as a part of the ‘inarticulable’ tether binding the collection that makes up Customs, the latest group exhibition at A4 Gallery, by A4 Arts Foundation. “Not because [the knowledge is] not being articulated,” Vally explains in the show’s…
Black Brazilian singers and artists are “finally” talking about love and affection in their music and work — in addition to stereotypes, masculinity, patriarchy, racism and censorship. With the continuous breaking down of barriers, combined with recent access to power and the market, and above all, narratives of protagonists and valorisation, more people can be…
