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It is rare for visitors to commercial art galleries to receive a welcome, let alone be graciously received by a divinity, but this is precisely what happens at Brundyn’s current exhibition 'Any Way, the Wind Blows'. You wander past the receptio

It’s always hard to talk about pain. Even when we talk about our own pain, we find ourselves caught short. Language fails us. Oh sure, there’s any number of words to describe the subjective experience of suffering: ache, affliction, agony

Sue Williamson’s 'There’s Something I must tell you' (2014) forms a survey of our history from 1981 to 2013, and examines the involvement of several generations of black, colored, Indian and white women, in the struggle against apartheid.

In Portugal in 1974, a leftist coup d’etat replaced Salazar’s repressive, right-wing, traditionalist and pro-Catholic regime with a socialist democracy. One result was the immediate cessation of the prohibitively costly war waged against

“I was driving along the M7 the other day when, at the side of the highway, I saw a stray dog with a rope around its neck. Poor thing, I thought, there you wander without any inkling of what the future holds. Sooner or later that rope will get

As a child, Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapiro would draw the bogeymen from his nightmares as a way of purging his restless sleep of them. Today, his drawings are a kind of satire-therapy for many who delight in these widely published political cartoons, de

Although David Lurie’s 'Morning after Dark' is in a many ways a more political and less poetic enterprise than Olivié Keck’s exhibition False Priest (running simultaneously upstairs at Commune 1), Lurie shares with Keck an interest

Engaging with Zander Blom’s fourth 'New Paintings' exhibition, at the Stevenson in Cape Town, becomes a rather curious and ironic (but nonetheless enjoyable) affair, when one considers his collaborative and overtly anti-establishment improvisat

Through the ages people all over the world have been telling stories to each other. Some stories are told to make sense of the world we live in, to explain the things we do not understand. The artworks on display in the solo exhibition, 'False Priest

It’s a little known fact that Sigmund Freud disapproved of embroidery. He believed with his trademark causal certainty that 'dispositional hypnoid states' could grow out of the day-dreams to which needlework and similar occupations 'render wome

Webster’s Online Dictionary defines 'open' as having no enclosing or confining barrier, accessible on all or nearly all sides. Urban Dictionary defines it as someone who is easy to fuck. I forgot the point I was trying to make with this sentenc

From the 4 September to the 25 October 2014, Brundyn+ Gallery hosted Sidy Diallo’s exhibition 'Points et Itineraires'. Sidy Diallo is a painter from Senegal who works in a style that is inspired by lithography, a medium characteristic of many A

The exhibition ‘Distance’, at Salon 91, showcases the works of two promising Cape Town artists, Kirsten Lilford and Sarah Biggs – both former UCT Michaelis graduates. On the opening night I was asked to review the show. This seemed

A couple of years ago I became obsessed with conspiracy theory. Not because I believe for example that the Royal Family are secretly lizards, but because the leaps and acrobatics of conspiratorial thinking seemed interesting, and the characters inves

This is a story of lost innocence told through images of Quentino, a young boy growing up in Elsie’s River, a Cape Flats suburb deeply plagued by gang violence. In January, a Grade One pupil of 7 was shot in a gang related incident in Elsie&rsq

More people are travelling all over the world, leaving their home countries behind in search of better things and new experiences. Some are forced to move by circumstances beyond their control, while others choose to explore the world and embark on n

Curators Josephine Higgins, Kathryn Smith and Penny Siopis’ sensitively constructed exhibition ‘Between Subject & Object, human remains at the interface of art and science’ presents us with the wide spectrum of subjects and obje

I have written on several occasions of my concerns about the current swathe of abstract painting that has filled our galleries in the last three years. There are at this particular moment three (four if you count the residency of Jan-Henri Booye

‘Contemporary Art/South Africa’ opened on May 9, 2014, at the Yale University Art Gallery. Yale’s first display of contemporary African art showcased over thirty works produced in South Africa or by South Africans, including objects

In his third solo exhibition ‘Into the BLACK’, Joburg based Burundian artist Serge Alain Nitegeka delves into modern art history's fascination with the colour black. This is however, after a considered walk through the show, only at the s

It may sound absurd but don't be naïveEven heroes have the right to bleedI may be disturbed but won’t you concedeEven Heroes have the right to dreamAnd it's not easy to be me-Five For Fighting- Superman (It’s Not Easy) (2000) Meander

We live in the age of the selfie, where a Kim Kardashian can spend an entire holiday in Thailand seeking new backgrounds for selfies (1200 in all) destined to be made into a book for her absent partner because ‘he wasn’t there to share in

Khaya Sineyile was born in the early 1980’s which means, as anyone who grew up in the township like he did can attest to, that he was raised by either a grandmother or at the very least by a woman. Sineyile’s exhibition ‘Abahananasi

The cavernous central space of Brundyn+, large enough to hold a small historical manufactory, provides an industrial stage for ‘The Planet’s Wake’, comprising an extraordinary variety of different works by the genius bricoleur Chad

I was standing with the artist Kiluanji Kia Henda towards the end of the opening night of his exhibition ‘as god want and the devil likes it’ at Brundyn+ when he turned to me. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘let’s take our reven

In Ian Grose’s ‘Dissimulation’ series of paintings, he renders folded and patterned cloth. From a distance it looks like drapery, each fold revealed not exclusively through shadow but through the distortion of pattern. Closer up, it

The semi-domestic space of The New Church serves as a comfortable temporary home for the collection of paintings brought together for Deborah Poynton’s retrospective: ‘Deborah Poynton’s Model for a World: 25 years of Painting’

Once, at the height of the Zimbabwean economic crises, I heard a journalist friend describe a young woman in a Joburg bar as: ‘one of the orphans of Harare.’ Suddenly, from then on, her identity as a Zimbabwean born female became wrapped

At Trevor Coleman’s splendidly-hung review exhibition of his 60s and 70s abstract paintings at SMAC Art Gallery in Stellenbosch, a mere handful of fourteen canvases fill the first, very long, very large exhibition space with the clamour of thei

Living in Johannesburg, if you believe many of its white residents, is like living next door to the apocalypse. The city centre, we frequently tell one another, is beset by armies of homeless people lining pavements like the undead after the disappea

There is something rather heartening about the fact that the experience of an artwork can almost never be adequately substituted for by its documentation or its reproduction, the vast majority of which fails mightily at capturing the work which it su

‘No Everything’ is a similar utterance to the one emitted by ArtThrob’s own back-end developer. ‘Badly written’ he pronounced as he struggled with our coding. ‘What is?’ I asked. ‘Badly written everythi

There are two figures, charmed into a motionless attention, that meet visitors as they enter the Goodman Gallery’s Joburg premises. These are Zimbabwean-born artist, Gerald Machona’s ‘Afronauts', the principal characters of his new

While Mohau Modisakeng’s work on his first solo exhibition at Brundyn+, ‘Ditaola’, does not represent a demarcated era, Untitled (Rickshaw) as an object draws one into the beginnings of European presence in the Cape – and inde

The captivating show 'Surfacing' calls one to explore the array of possibilities, of things coming to the surface, held by the title. White hats floating in the air, a light-box photograph of water glimmering on the wall and some disturbing sounds gr

Concrete is a magical substance. We use more concrete than any other substance, barring water. It’s as close as we have gotten to creating rock, yet before it sets it is pourable, moldable and mutable. We think of concrete as unchanging and per

'Ghosts' by Johannesburg born artist, Ralph Ziman, initially opened at the Los Angeles C.A.V.E. gallery in February and in April opened at Cape Town’s MUTI gallery. It is the artist’s first solo exhibition in his home country. Ralph Ziman

Harris Steinman is well known for his series of landscapes titled 'Kirstenbosch beyond words' (2005) and his personal nightscapes exhibited at the Cape Town Month of Photography in 2012. He is also known for exhibiting at the Youngblood Arts and Cult

I have felt for some time that video art is much like the work of Raphael, or, at least, what Joshua Reynolds said about Raphael’s artistic language. To understand it, one must go on and on looking at it until one starts to appreciate it. Perha

The title of Thabiso Sekgala’s solo show at Goodman Cape Town, ‘Running’, is a non-finite verb form. As both a gerund and a present participle it contains within itself an infinite indeterminate space: it is unending, unbounded, for