“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…
“The record of thoughtful play becomes a play” Fred Moten, 2021. All Incomplete “Now, the story can begin. / Hear this: you proud, you wounded, you short of breath, you blinded by tears, you with a foot upon your back. / We do not wish to tell the story of an African tragedy / Nor…
On Sunday, 18 April a fire erupted on the slopes of the mountain above Philip Kgosana Drive in Cape Town and set ablaze, among other buildings, the UCT Jagger library. In a statement to the public, the UCT Executive Director of the libraries, Ujala Satgoo, stated that the Reading Room had been destroyed and valuable…
there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naïve use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order, no kind of photograph in which such beauty could not turn out to be present: an unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine–art…
The past few weeks have been really difficult for most of us. To paraphrase Baldwin, to be Black and relatively conscious in this world is to be in a constant state of rage. Between dealing with my own feelings about the police brutality here in South Africa, as well as the world over, and thinking…
Pulling on threads from the UK, Mozambique, Sweden and South Africa, Lesela Collective is looking at the material narratives of the African continent by exploring the countless sequences embedded within the field of textiles. Creating a new archive that is keenly aware of the colonial legacy entwined with African textiles, Lesela Collective members Wacy Zakarias…
Queer political student activist, writer and image creator Tarryn Naude intersects text and image in a flawless quirk. Image and text become inseparable in a gesture that results in any attempt to view them as single elements divorced from one another failing to reach the impact intended. Taking their visual cues from subtitled foreign films,…
An archive collected and carefully preserved for 10 years. Scope magazine. The tropes of the glamour model. Boobs, it’s all about the boobs. The pose drives it. Objectifying ‘her’ makes you a “man”. Printed in high gloss and colour coordinated- red, yellow and shiny. As you enter the first room and take a spatial inventory…
‘Feedback: Art, Africa and the 1980s’ is an exhibition currently being held at Iwalewahaus at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Iwalewahaus maintains a collection of modern visual arts from Africa, Asia and the Pacific. In addition to visual arts, the archive of Iwalewahaus houses an extensive collection of contemporary African music, films and African…
A series of summer workshops held at the faculty of Art Education at Helwan University in Egypt set in motion the coming together of art practitioners Dia Hamed and Mohamed Allam. Their collective effort was directed towards creating spaces and opportunities to show their work. This led to the founding of their non-profit independent organisation…
Stacks of time-stained pages – riffled and rummaged through. Transactions marked only by an undiscovered paper trail. Complicit in ink. Characters emerge from oblique connections, layered in relations as narratives spill forth as the archive bears its secrets. Denise Bertschi engages with a research-centric art practice. Often her extensive research process is initially sparked by…
One of my favorite hidden gems in Joburg just so happens to also be a “tribute to South Africa’s punk and alternative scene” past! On Jan smuts, opposite the Goodman gallery lies an entrance surrounded by a leather garments display, and if you’re lucky you will see a black and chrome bike with dangling tassels…
