“The ideas, many of which will unfold through years of engaged political work, need not be perfect, for in the end, it will be the hard, creative work of the communities that take them on. That work is the concrete manifestation of political imagination.” Concealed in the corner of the exit (or entrance, depending on…
Held at The Market Photo Workshop from the 1st to the 2nd of December 2023, a reflective celebration of the release of The Brother Moves On‘s first album A New Myth (2013), coincided with the passing of former President Nelson Mandela. This conceptual foundation led to a concert series, culminating in a final episode that…
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…
“Within this burning planet has always existed another world, and the struggle to realise it,” says Nolan Oswald Dennis. The logic of colonial cosmology insists on the universality of the Western world: a planet rendered as private property, as social violence, as deliberate crisis. Occupying the same space and time as the colonial planet are…
My week in the Goodman Gallery’s online viewing room: worrying about shebeen queens, the pleasures of home viewing and new coping mechanisms On Monday, a police officer with an automatic weapon was prowling about the entrance of my building. Unnerved, I rubbernecked over the balcony and saw that he was standing guard over a forensics…
Surveillance modes and technologies inform how we see ourselves, how we behave, and how we see others. Its ubiquity has penetrated the making of contemporary society, with these methods making us visible and visualised subjects. With this emphasis on rendering people visible, there is also resistance and manipulation of these methods in an attempt to…
What is the colonial wound you have to heal from? These are all the wounds infringed by patriarchy and racism, in all walks of life. Patriarchy and racism are two pillars of Eurocentric knowing, sensing, and believing. – Walter Mignolo Decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo speaks to the importance of having decolonial options as a means…
Kunsthal KAdE in the Netherlands will host a new exhibition titled Tell Freedom. 15 South African artists. The 15 artists featured engage with South Africa’s history of racial violence, racial capitalism, inequalities and injustice. However, there is a sense of hope for the future that comes across in their work; a realistic hope that comes…
Mounds of earth erupt from a soft slate coloured screed floor. Soil cocoons containing rectangular white boxes pepper the project space. Informative posters hang vertically off the walls, divulging details about Ubulawu – a collection of plants traditionally used in South African spiritual practice. The exhibition explores an Afrocentric approach to decolonial healing through ancient…
Nolan Oswald Dennis’ current exhibition, titled Furthermore, at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town resists (neo)colonial logics of closure and destabilises the necrological dimensions of neo-imperial violence that continue to suffocate the vitality of life within the “always collapsing social fiction” of a ‘new’ South Africa. Instead of circumscribing what constitutes ‘reality’ through the exclusions…
