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…
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…
