How are we to understand the time we are living in? This essay is written in the present tense about a tense present. The present is indeed tense! It is Marked by racial injustice, fraught debates about identity, and a global pandemic. W.J.T Mitchell, Present Tense: Time, Madness and Democracy. We can speculate on the…
*This essay forms part of Bubblegum’s Collaboration with Bag Factory and their visiting curator from Uganda, EM Mirembe. Reader, writer and PhD candidate Mapule Mohulatsi reads R. Daniels‘ artwork The Dreamer, in Medindi Manor with meditations on wakefulness. This is about a sleeping, possibly dead, black woman I met at a Cape Town lodge where the…
What is time? A secret – insubstantial and omnipotent. A prerequisite of the external world, a motion intermingled and fused with bodies existing and moving in space. But would there be no time if there were no motion?… Time is active, by nature it is much like a verb, it both ‘ripens’ and ‘brings forth’….
From the northern hemisphere to the south, we all love stories, it is a part of our essence. Stories are the source for our need to know, to discover, to explore. Thinking about the lockdown we experienced in 2020 and the one we are still within this year, most of our time was spent with…
The last couple of years have had a disorienting effect on artists, curators and cultural producers alike. That being said, a sense of groundlessness and disorientation can in fact breed fertile ground for daring ideas to flourish. I learnt recently of a key piece of advice Ai Weiwei gives to the young generation of artists…
I feel like for a long time as Africans we’ve been under the rug with the influence that we’ve given the world. Now is a time when we’re saying, ‘No, we want to be seen. We want to be heard. And we want the world to know that we’ve connected everybody and everything did come…
There’s a beautiful thought experiment that writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun suggests we should undertake: “Imagine a team of African archeologists from the future—some silicon, some carbon, some wet, some dry—excavating a site, a museum from their past: a museum whose ruined documents and leaking discs are identifiable as belonging to our present, the early…
Whenever confused along the journey of life — lost in an abyss of darkness struggling to navigate towards the light — a healing, and sometimes necessary act, is that of retracing your steps back home. This pilgrimage of homecoming forms the conceptual bedrock of Dominican visual artist and director Amanda Valle’s exploration in her latest…
“I want to challenge this idea of the archive as something that exists in a distant past, rather, understanding it as something that can be living, porous and flexible. Thinking of the archive like this can be a kind of memory practice against the ‘ritual of forgetting.” Achille Mbembe, 2002. History was like an old…
CODA is a short documentary following urban youth cruising through Johannesburg in December. Directed by Hallie Haller — whose creative output also finds home in forms of writing — and shot at the edge of a new year, the short film asks us to consider the passing of time and what it means to us….
I work with collages involving mainly the iconoclastic process of uprooting images from mass produced print media and proposing alternative realities through reconstruction of hallucinated images. My work is made with the intention to generate propaganda as a means to reject the certainty of the normal/ the reasonable often presented by hegemonic representations of ‘reliable…
A couple of years ago, I wandered through the quite obviously constructed industrial showroom of a high-end homeware store in Kramerville — an expansive space often sparsely filled with ludicrously expensive imported furniture pieces. The grey walls littered with drab black and white wildlife photography and commercially clinical Keith Haring and Picasso prints. Meandering up…
