JOHANNESBURG

Two of the country's best known artists, Capetonians Willie Bester and Zwelethu Mthethwa, are showing their most recent work at the Goodman Gallery until July 11. Bester's densely worked three-dimensional collages and constructions continue to reflect a strong sense of narrative and an urgent insistence that the past should not be forgotten, while master colourist Mthethwa, with his glowing palette of cobalt, crimson, scarlet, lime green and purple, draws on the personal and the observed for his themes.

In a first excursion into the three-dimensional, painter Mthethwa shows the piece exhibited on Houston Fotofest earlier this year: Frankie's Barber Shop (see ArtThrob March) - an evocative chest of drawers with photo images of Frankie, the barber at the Nyanga bus terminal, on the mirrors and sides. Viewers opening the hair-filled drawers are treated to the sounds of Frankie's conversation with his customers and the background sounds of the taxi rank.

Jeremy Wafer is one of those rare artists held almost universally in high esteem by his peers. Often appearing understated at first glance, his work is underpinned by a formal rigour and a delight in surface, and a deeper scrutiny is always rewarded.

On the phone, Wafer describes his upcoming show like this: "There are three sets of series of work. The first is a series of photographs of antholes - 25 close looks at a similar thing, but on and on · And then there is a group of sculptures, nine of them, oval-shaped, about 500cm long; the surfaces have got lumps on them, and they're polished with red stoep polish. The third series is a group of paintings on glass - simple iconic shapes, spindle shapes, one metre by half a metre, with centralised black images on a white ground, one with a rippled edge and one with a punched edge and so on · It's about working on a focused form and subjecting it to a whole lot of variations and permutations." Can't wait to see it .

An extract from Sue Williamson's press statement reads: "Truth Games considers the role of the TRC in the healing/not healing of the nation through a series of interactive pieces. Each piece pictures an accuser, a defender, and an image of the event in question. At no time are all three images visible, as text taken from the transcripts and printed on slats obscures sections. Viewers are invited to slide these slats across different parts of the images to conceal or reveal parts in an attempt to replicate the action of the country in trying to decide whether the truth is being spoken or still hidden."

Materials used include wood, perspex, colour laserprints made from newspaper photographs. Also on the show is a large-scale lithograph on the same theme made earlier this year as a collaborative project at the Institute for Innovative Printmaking at Rutgers University, New Jersey (see Journal from New York).

Both shows open July 18 and continue through the first week of August.

One of the factors which has to be taken into account by artists exhibiting in the Rembrandt van Rijn Art Gallery at the Market is having to compete for the attention of viewers with the light flooding in through the handsome large arched windows at the back of the space. Pretoria artist Abrie Fourie applies his own solution by controlling this light with colour gels across the windows, altering the light and colour values of the gallery and introducing a restrained and and warm setting for his series of photographic light boxes. These boxes display images reflecting Fourie's domestic and public life in his home town. The title of the installation is does not the ear test words as the tongue tastes food, and the senses are further engaged with a soundtrack. Opens July 4, and closes July 25.

Talk about superb timing - South African-born, Scotland-based artist Neville Gabie's exhibition of goal posts photographed around the world might be the only art-related activity to drag the soccer-mad from their couches right now. The photographs do serve to prove more than that soccer is played just about everywhere, however, and can be enjoyed from a land art point of view for the effect of the simple but classic sculptural three-sided goalposts against landscapes ranging from rural to industrial.

The show ends July 7, and on July 14 'Buttons' will take its place. Artist Gordon Froud has invited 100 established artists to make buttons for this fund-raiser. Ends August 4. For more info phone gallery manager Antoinette Murdoch at 011 403-3408, ext 125.

Mark July 29 down on your calendars - it's the night on which this year's Vita Art Now Awards show opens and the overall winner is announced. Each of the five finalists has been given R4 000 to make a piece, and the extremely strong line-up leads to high expectations of challenging work. In alphabetical order, the finalists are Siemon Allen, whose elegant but enigmatic screen on the SANG show 'Graft' had viewers asking nonplussed gallery attendants for enlightenment; Lisa Brice, last seen in Johannesburg with her 'Staying Alive' show at the Goodman, and on the subversive 'Smokkel' at the Biennale; the ubiquitous and multi-talented William Kentridge; wünderkind Moshekwa Langa, still studying in Holland; and that master of utilising natural materials in his sculptural installations, Sandile Zulu. Predictions for the winner? It will depend on what work each artist produces for this show.

Curated by Clive van den Berg, seen originally at the Albany Museum at the Grahamstown Festival, and having been travelling around the United States for the past three years, the mega exhibition 'Panoramas of Passage: Changing Landscapes of South Africa' is now on its last leg. South Africa's history is inextricably bound up with the land, with bitter questions of ownership and dominance, and works by a wide range of artists, living and dead, cast varying lights on aspects of this issue. At the Gertrude Posel Gallery in Senate House, University of Witwatersrand, until July 10. Try not to miss this one.

'Memorias Intimas Marcas' marches to Pretoria

Tracy Murinik updates ArtThrob on the latest manifestation

Moving to the African Window Museum in Pretoria, 'Memorias Intimas Marcas' again brings with it new changes and new additions. This time, constructed to evoke a makeshift war hospital, the works are housed in long rows of white plastic-clad cubicles labelled in sections: "Laboratory", "Operating", "Autopsies", "Examination", "Emergency".

The sentiment appears to be centred on healing, a message strongly echoed at the opening by Deputy Minister of Culture to Angola, Dr Ruy Mingas, who spoke boldly about transformation and "redemption" through a new generation.

A striking new addition to the show is Pretoria-based artist Jan van der Merwe, who has produced life-sized renditions of military furniture and uniforms stunningly crafted using rusted tin. These, in relation to Fernando Alvim's furniture counterparts of hospital bed with "resurrected" babies and fetishised chair, create an uncanny and profound dialogue.

Lien Botha's broken glasses/"landmines" from the Electric Workshop are reinstalled in Pretoria, literally "salvaged" and kept safe in a medicine cabinet in her space. Wayne Barker's advertisement for people to donate military paraphernalia to the exhibition has brought in an astonishing quantity and array of items from uniforms to medals to cutlery sets, bags and boots.

Fernando Alvim's wheelchair, which has metamorphosed in each new space, holds in its lap a fish tank with live sharkfish, set into a meshed birdcage. In Johannesburg, the birdcage held two lovebirds, which duly escaped. This time, the cage door remains open and the strange, surreal vision of the fish swimming around in an open cage is redemptive, soothing and mesmerising.

On until July 15.

Brett Murray lights up the NSA

Functional art has rarely been so cheerful and charming as Brett Murray's steel and perspex lights, now marketed under his new tradename of Bigboy. Every home should have at least one of these softly glowing iconic images, which range in subject matter from the universal: planets, space ships and a blue world, to the sartorial: dudes and gals with Afro hairdos, through a series of comic-book characters to the domestic - a gently steaming cup of tea.

The show closes July 10.

Leon Vermeulen and Mustafa Maluka at the AVA

This show is a pleasure to visit. Although these Cape Town artists did not collaborate on the work beforehand, the paintings of each seem to resonate off the other's in a highly satisfactory way, probably because each artist so clearly understands what it is he is trying to do: focus on a personal history against the background of a specific social and political framework. In other words, each artist is dealing with his own life.

Mustafa Maluka (this month's artbio) grew up in Bishop Lavis, and his work is young, still evolving, edgy, graffiti-laden. The graffiti and racially stereotypical statements are not there just to provide local colour, but as considered choices and lead-up lines to a textual payoff: a piece with such statements finishes at the bottom with the warning: "I DO NOT REPRESENT TRUTH. DON'T BELIEVE WHO I AM."

Leon Vermeulen's work is always strong, tight, taut, sinewy. If he exhibited more widely, he would be one of the top names in the country. Look and Learn is a disturbing triptych, three panels in which much of the action seems to be happening beyond the edge of the canvas. In the top panel, an old man is held in the air by a pair of powerful black hands, in the manner in which a father holds his infant son. In the second, the movement of the subject is being arrested by a large hand on his shoulder, and in the third a television presenter stares out through a pair of binoculars. Look and Learn. The title seems to be the key to the interpretation of the piece. Stumbling (detail on Contents) shows a running figure holding a television set, other sets floating discarded in the air as he runs, two suited men talking, a sketchy crab, a field and a fence · The description doesn't do the piece justice. Go and see it.

Both shows close July 11.

'Before Swallowing' is the title of this engaging exhibition of dozens of small self-portraits made in foodstuffs by Jo O'Connor at the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet. The catalogue statement reads: "The work for this exhibition began with a series of drawing experiments with my supper. I seemed to want to manipulate what I was making/cooking on my stove into an image that described my feelings about myself and this constant companion - what I eat." As good a starting point as any. O'Connor varies her drawing techniques from portrait to portrait, depending on her sensual response to that particular food, and the fun for the viewer is identifying the effect of peanut butter as medium, or creamed spinach and feta, or curried butternut. On until July 18.

Collaborative work in which more than one artist will work on the same surface is not an easy process to bring off. All too often the work of one collaborator will dominate to the detriment of the others. That the four concerned in this project - Gregg Smith, Mustafa Maluka, Ice and Sky 1 - managed to pull it off with such elan is terrific. "It was brilliant," says Maluka, describing the working process. "I loved working with other people on the same suface - working out the balances between the positive and negative influences of our growing up." The title of the show is 'Childhood', and reflects the very different kinds of upbringing the four artists, all Capetonians, experienced.

Gregg Smith is a traditional painter, and prepared "public and domestic" floor-type surfaces for the four to work on. Large floor-to-ceiling boards line one side of the gallery, with smaller pieces on the opposite side. Smith's contribution is small-scale paintings of his own childhood and the reproductions of French Impressionist works remembered from his youth; aerosol artists Ice and Sky 1 worked in brilliant colour on top of these, and Maluka added pop imagery and gangster graffiti.

The show ends on July 4, so this review is a wake up call to those who've been meaning to find their way over to Cecil Street in Rosebank.

The symbiotic relationship between Absolut vodka and the artists it invites to have their way with its now distinctive bottle takes on a new slant at the Area. This time around, it's the photographers making the bottle the subject of their work. Participants include Dave Southwood, Lien Botha, Geoff Grundlingh and Ruth Motau. On until July 11.

Reviewed for ArtThrob by Cape Town artist Paul Edmunds

'A Changed World' showcases British sculpture from the 1960s to the present, and if it presents a "changed world", it is one changed by degree rather than by grand gesture. The show attempts to demonstrate how recent British work has reinvented and expanded the notion of "sculpture". Tracing a lineage from Henry Moore and Anthony Caro, we are presented with anything from images taped onto a wall, to photographs and documentation, to sculptural objects to support this idea.

While the media and modes of representation are incredibly diverse and many traditions are questioned, there are a number of recurrent themes and ideas. Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Long, Antony Gormley and David Nash all confront us with the idea of space or the filling thereof; they concern themselves, rather than with objects or ideas, with the relationships between such phenomena. Use and uselessness (and thus art-making itself) is addressed in various ways by Richard Wilson, Hadrian Piggott, Cathy de Monchaux and Langlands & Bell. Other ideas are at play here, and the above themes overlap in some works, such as Whiteread's False Door, a plaster cast reflecting its domestic origins.

The works are mostly modest in scale and even ambition, and are perhaps not the best representations of each artist's work. They do, however, present an accessible, evocative, fairly thorough and entertaining view of this period of British sculpture. A lightness of touch, a refined aesthetic and a touch of whimsy pervade this exhibition. The artists prove willing to address, discuss or just muse over issues which are less "serious" than those with which we are used to dealing here.

The strength of them, however, lies in their part in each artist's oeuvre, and its situation within a particular social and artistic context. This allows the artists to address, explore and adopt "very little", and it is this willingness which perhaps resulted in the diverse exploration of media which characterises this chapter of art-making. The starkness and simplicity of Whiteread's False Door, the ingenuity and pluck of Bill Woodrow's Long Distance Surveillance and the sensual and intellectual conundrum of Kapoor's Void appealed most to me.

Rest assured that anyone who has seen this show will ask you if you have seen Tim Lewis' Conceit of Retention, which presents itself with much fanfare but seems concerned with little more than itself.

Ten photographers at the A.R.T. Gallery

An interestingly diverse selection of photographers presents work in an old wine cellar space at Clementina van der Walt's Ceramic Studio and Craft Gallery in Paarl. Land artist Strijdom van der Merwe shows documentation of his interventions in landscape; there's a lyrical photographic essay on the Himba people of the Kaokaveld in northern Namibia by Tracey Derrick; and Anna Zieminski has been spending time over the past year in the Arderne Gardens, in Claremont, favourite Saturday site for large groups of gorgeously clad wedding parties, and shows the result of this enterprise. Others on the show are Rodger Bosch, Lien Botha, Mark Coetzee, Tessa Frootko Gordon, Geoff Grundlingh, Ronnie Levitan and John Martin.

The A.R.T. Gallery is on Parys Farm, Van Riebeeck Drive (R303) Huguenot, Paarl. Phone: (021) 872 7514. The exhibition closes July 20.

Listings continued: Grahamstown and Nieu Bethesda