I sat down with Jill Richards in Melville amidst the sounds of a Thursday morning in a coffee shop courtyard. The gentle whir of a generator, the hiss of a steam wand, footsteps on the pebbled ground and quiet chatter between friends were the ambient noises behind our conversation; sounds I noticed only after they…
“Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.” Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road “Experiences like this: they seem to accumulate over time, gathering like things in a bag, but the bag is your…
The year is 2017, the building is August House. Here, established and baby artists gather ceremoniously to water their artistic gardens into bloom. I’ve been revisiting the day we met, after you ascended from the body on the 11th of August. On the afternoon our worlds first collided, I sat quietly at a tiny desk…
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…
As heavy rain swept across KwaZulu Natal in April 2022 — causing floods and landslides — homes, cars and businesses were destroyed leaving unimaginable damage across all fronts. The whole of KwaZulu Natal was left impacted. While some people were able to replace some lost or damaged items, artists could not do the same. As…
Born in Ghana, Gideon Appah is a visual artist best known for his expressive paintings and drawings that bring together personal experiences, historical references and mythology. Presented at the Institute for Contemporary Art — Virginia Commonwealth University — Forgotten, Nudes, Landscapes is Appah’s first institutional solo exhibition that coalesces diverse mediums to register and reflect…
Curated by Joseph Gergel, Crossed Looks includes approximately 90 works from the Guinean Swiss photographer Namsa Leuba‘s initiatives in Guinea, South Africa, Nigeria, Benin and Tahiti. The Halsey Institute presented Crossed Looks from August to December 2021 — being Leuba’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Namsa Leuba moved to Guinea Conkary, her mother’s…
In their seminal book, Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art, Anthony Gardner and Charles Green trace the history of mega exhibitions and consider their impact on the art ecology. Through this lens, they provide a reading of the “biennialization” of the art world. Gardner and Green argue that biennales have “brought…
From witnessing his 2021 exhibition, Garage-ism, right through to viewing the impact of his most recent solo exhibition, Monochrome Paintings, here in Johannesburg – Zander Blom’s work has always left me enthused and enthralled. From the plethora of contemporary artistic influences and references which Blom draws from, this artist has managed to forge his own…
Neoliberalism and all his children, such as The American Dream and all its variations, would have many Black African artists spending their nights conjuring up dreams of achieving excellence via Western standards. In line with a culture of celebrating and uplifting our people, we would cheer on when one of our own local artists is…
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…
Brünn Kramer’s Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Tronkvoël, opened at the RAW Spot Gallery of the Arts of Africa and Global Souths research programme in the Department of Fine Arts, at the University currently known as Rhodes in Makhanda on 12 March 2021. From 08 – 29 August 2021, the show which utilised the visual…
