Africa’s representation has been exhausting – it’s typically about poverty and her friends, disease, unemployment and corruption. From the West, Africa is every NGOs wet dream or just one long sad story. Now being raised in Sweden with strong Ethiopian and Eritrean roots, Teddy Goitom and Senay Berhe knew the pitiful narrative. It all changed when…
Since its inception in 2006, the label Butan has become a part of South Africa’s streetwear landscape. The name Butan came from re-arranging the word ‘bantu’. This can be viewed as symbolic of how the label takes pride in bringing an African perspective to streetwear. “We pride ourselves in being an African label with a strong…
Over the last 8 years ANTiGEL Festival has grown to become one of the largest cultural events in Geneva. By bringing artistic experience to parts of the city that are detached from this kind of engagement, the festival aims to be a reminder of the importance of making spaces for arts and culture. Africa What’s…
All the way from Brixton in the UK, the dystopian style of Gaika will be greeting South Africans and Malawians for the first time in February. A childhood surrounded by various forms of tech and scientific innovation fostered within, Gaika’s current mode of production inspired by the digitization of humanity. Gaika’s sound can be compared…
The project BORN::FREE Next Steps was conceptualized as a poetry exchange involving artists based in South Africa and the UK. This three-part series of events and workshops explores themes including gender, race and spirituality, among others. The most powerful impact of the project has been the forging of relationships between South African and British live literature…
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…
Siwa Mgoboza‘s recent work explores difference and belonging, which is strongly tied to his personal experiences growing up abroad and later moving back to South Africa for university. Within these larger themes of difference and belonging, Mgoboza tackles his own expectations of equality and fairness he attached to South Africa while living abroad, and how…
Utopia is more than just a description of the ideal society but a description of who we want be. It Is a description of our understanding of the ideal state of the human being and for those who seek social change, it is the space that allows us to become the expression for our very…
Our interview would actually begin in the front seat of my car as we made our way through Johannesburg central. My appointment with Ms Tajdin had been made very late by an ANC convoy that had decided to cut in front of us. With no ways of getting through, and a very angry Metro police…
CUSS Group, formed in 2011 by Ravi Govender, Jamal Nxedlana and Zamani Xolo, have been tsatsatsa since the get-go and need little introduction; they were South Africa’s first arts collective to focus on digital technologies and have, since then, gone viral, infiltrating a diversity of spaces; from car boots in Zimbabwe to MoMA in Poland,…
The British Council’s Connect ZA Arts Programme supports, highlights, and extends collaborative cultural exchanges between South Africa and the UK. They work across a wide variety of art forms in order to discover and nurture new and existing talent and connections between young people aged 18 to 35. They’ve been pioneering innovative ways to understand…
If Mkay Frash were a comic book character, he would levitate in celestial space, straddling comets, in constant orbit between worlds. His hands cupped, as though in telepathy with the surrounding sky-scape. From his outstretched fingers, threads extend like webs, connecting disparate planets, weaving transcendental tapestries. This would be his superpower: his ability to draw…
