Nkhensani Mkhari shows a finger he maimed while playing with fireworks as a child, cursing it as the reason he was not permitted to complete an undergraduate degree in Fine Art. Other experiences followed that would give him a similar feeling of being just outside of the South African art scene, all while being a visual artist and an important contributor to the visual art ecosystem.
“I used to be so bitter when I was younger because I was making all of this art and it wouldn’t be in art fairs. I’d visit an art fair as if I’m not a part of the ecosystem. I felt like an outsider.” Mkhari’s work as the Special Projects Curator and Production Manager at RMB Latitudes Art Fair has afforded him the chance to right what he sees as wrongs done unto him and other artists; a chance at becoming whole.
RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2023. Photo by Anthea Pokroy. Courtesy of Latitudes.
RMB Latitudes Art Fair is, in its own right, a “new” art fair in search of wholeness. For three months in 2019, co-founders Lucy MacGarry and Roberta Coci assembled a visual art experience in a marquee on Sandton’s Nelson Mandela Square. This was touted as a fringe event to the much bigger and more illustrious FNB Joburg Art Fair taking place a few hundred metres from the square over the same weekend. “We were quite amazed because we got about 7,000 visitors,” said MacGarry, “but it all happened very quickly. We were planning towards the next event, and then COVID happened.”
Forced into hibernation by the national lockdowns, MacGarry and Coci spent the next three years addressing a gap in the Sub-Saharan African art market: online visual art trade. “We hustled and made it happen. We launched just before we went into hard lockdown [June 2020].” The online art buying and selling platform Latitudes started with 300 artists and now boasts 1,800 artists.
Its growth has raised fears of cutting into the market shares of galleries, auction houses, and consultants by putting collectors in direct contact with artists, many of whom do not have representation. When the RMB Latitudes in-person art fair’s plans of providing space for independent artists alongside established galleries were announced, these fears compounded.
In this context, Mkhari conceptualised INDEX, a portmanteau for independent exhibition, as a major feature of RMB Latitudes that would point (like an index finger) novice and well-heeled collectors to some of the most active and interesting independent visual artists in South Africa. “Independent artists can never compete with galleries,” Mkhari said. “The fact that I was never in an art fair because, that’s literally the evidence that I could never compete with them.”
Individual experiences aside, the South African visual arts ecosystem is in short supply of platforms that showcase independent artists. The salon style of INDEX allowed for sculpture, painting, photography and mixed media works to share a space while avoiding the feeling of bric-à-brac crowdedness. The novelty of the INDEX experience was how it recognised shared styles and themes in the mainstream commercial visual art ecosystem. Here were artists who, although themselves open to influence, are tapping into different sources of creativity.
In an underground cavern opposite the entrance to the Art Fair, a sculptural work by Cazlynne Peffer was captivating because of its combined simplicity and poignancy. Titled Ordentlike meisies sit toe bene (respectable girls sit with their legs closed), it is made of a chair repurposed to look like it was sitting cross-legged and bound by fabric and pantyhose. This is an insightful critique of the etiquette imposed on women from an early age.
Thamani Nobakanda, The face of productivity on a busy day, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Thamani Nobakanda’s work The face of productivity on a busy day comprises acrylic paint on lace paper, depicting a half-dressed woman lounging in what could be a modernly decorated living room. The use of a lace pattern harks back to lace curtain styles that were popular with a particular generation of South Africans that contrasts with the message of rest taking precedence over constant productivity. One can almost hear a disapproving parent’s voice emanating from the work.
This one thread, of contemporary artists challenging propriety in modernity, shifts the focus of the themes considered to be the most dominant in South African contemporary art and how these are approached. It is an aesthetic and intellectual delight.
The mainstream commercial galleries, for their part, contrasted with INDEX by the pared down, considered approach most of them made in response to this year’s RMB Latitudes theme of co-emergence. For the most part, each gallery showed works by one or a handful of artists in complementary styles at their booths. Galleries that are based outside of the African continent who work with African artists could not, however, shed the extractive tone that accompanies their trade. It would be difficult to, considering that RMB Latitudes gives a clear example of galleries from various African countries who offered nuanced ideas on “African” identity and culture. If not for the art, the droves of people who sold out the venue over the weekend were also attracted by wine and sustainable food offerings, and an extensive children’s programme, to an otherwise somewhat cloistered social circle of visual arts.
The combination of established and emerging, mainstream and independent visual art is somewhat novel in the South African art fair calendar, providing a space where those from outside of the visual art ecosystem feel encouraged and comfortable enough to enter while those already inside feel acknowledged enough to remain.
Novelty alone will not, however, carry it forever, contrary to the art fair’s second theme of sustainability. As their success in terms of patrons through the door echoes, other art fairs are bound to follow a similar model, making it necessary for this art fair to differentiate itself essentially, in doing something that no other art fair can crack quite like they can.
RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2023. Photo by Alexander Smith. Courtesy of Latitudes.
