Investec Cape Town Art Fair
21.02 - 23.02.2025

Art fairs are a convergence of elements — drawing together a diverse range of ideas, modes, artistic practices and sensibilities under one roof—some of which are conflicting and others complementary. With such a broad scope, the fair, then, is an all-encompassing (all consuming) mish mash from which it is difficult to extrapolate any singular ‘truth’ about the current moment. 

If the contemporary moment is characterised by current social, cultural, political, technological and economic conditions understood as the ‘now’ — shaped by ideas that mediate our experience, then this fair, at least for me, felt almost anti-contemporary. Not in the sense of an attempt to be against the now but rather a kind of divergence from the heat of the moment that permeates life outside of the artworld. It is as if artists were allowing themselves to embrace randomness, imperfection and organic unpredictable patterns despite (or because of) everything else taking place in the world. 

These conditions are what make a true critique of the fair, in any real way, impossible. But this, in itself, is a strength. It is precisely the contradictions, fragments, partial truths and impossibilities of real truth that make fairs valuable—they don’t offer us any specific revelations or new insights into “the times.” What they do provide us is tiny loopholes, which, when carefully woven through, can transform into something useful. It is possible to recognise the lack in something and still find productive ways of organising one’s life around it. With this year’s theme built around the idea of play, perhaps more than ever, the Investec Cape Town Art Fair was ripe for contradiction.

But some artists are brilliant at contradiction. Take Warren Maroon for instance. He knows how to handle contradiction. His work — parallels of beauty and violence, muck and purity, pride and shame, opacity and clarity — continues to surprise me. Maroon may be one of the greatest living artists of my generation. I am constantly touched by the precision of his language and how he manages work that is just right, without the extremes of perfection or excess. His solo booth with Everard Read, part of the “Tomorrows/Today” curated section, brought together work under the title ‘Between Us’. In it, one finds clocks, shards of glass, okapi knives, white paper roses. The tension between chaos and stillness, intensity and gentleness, is palpable. In Utopia, a new work using rocks, matchsticks, wood, cement and found chairs, two busts stare at each other awkwardly. The first head looms over the second, which is sinking into a pile of matchsticks. An impasse. A Rubicon that cannot be crossed. Through this work, Maroon reflects on clarity, discomfort and empathy, drawing on practices that engage themes of displacement, loss and power asymmetries. 

Maroon doesn’t travel alone. In my mind he is in conversation, or kindred to Mawande Ka Zenzile, Bulumko Mbete, Inga Somdyala and Zenaéca Singh. These are artists who continue to challenge my way of looking and reading works in big and small ways. Bulumko Mbete’s Amahubo (songs) After Siwani, made with cotton, glass beads, polycotton, and indigo natural dye, is a rectangular work with a blue background and white circles outlining an image. The circles seem to form a kind of geometrically coded symbol, washed out in some areas and darker in others. It is this inconsistency, combined with the delicacy of the work, that draws me. It is surprising and delightful to see the direction Mbete’s work is taking in recent years. Still rooted in the significance of the material in holding histories, her work has increasingly become minimalist and simple, engaging a different relationship to tactility. 

Ka Zenzile stunned me for this fair. His painting, Ukuguqula ibhatyi, was completely obvious and literal. And that’s why it was so effective. Made with oil stick, gesso and linen on a reversed wooden frame, the painting speaks to disrobing oneself from toxic expectations. The work, which I read as a minor gesture of subversion—or at least, an attempt at it, subverts expectations by being too direct, showing exactly what it is proposing. I love it because I think it is bad. And here, bad is a huge compliment.

After reading Dean Kissick’s provocative text, “A Painted Protest”, in which he argues that identity politics has ruined art, I can’t help but move through the fair with a sense of measured skepticism. My senses are heightened to how artists will move toward or away from politics of representation amidst a schizophrenic discourse (and market) that is both hungry for and simultaneously tired of trauma. Reprimand our actions, but make it classy and keep it short. One artist who doesn’t seem scared of politics of representation is Thando Phenyane, whose practice I would argue keeps getting tighter. Part of ‘Tomorrows/Today’ his ‘Part Black, Part Anomaly’ showcase is a blend of sensual and strange black portraiture-cum-still-lifes, drawing on Fanon’s ‘Black Skin, White Masks’. Although I think the work is getting better on a technical level, I couldn’t help but notice that the paintings feel less gross, which initially was the allure they held for me. 

 

The fair was ticking along at the convention centre, but a few kilometres away, another world was unfolding—one of quieter, more intimate experiences. One of the most compelling interventions I saw was Jared Ginsburg’s solo exhibition, presented by curator and Stevenson gallerist Marc Barben at his apartment in Gardens. This was a curatorial gesture that spoke to the elasticity of what constitutes an exhibition—Barben’s home, now emptied of its domestic clutter, became the vessel for a long-standing relationship with the artist. There’s something profound (and sweet) about the act of exhibiting in a domestic space, where the art is contextualised not by the white cube but by the lived space of someone’s home. It suggests a more human engagement with the work. Ginsburg’s new works felt particularly inspired. It is as though he’s fully embraced the weird aspects of his practice and is clearly having a lot of fun in the process. As a critique to his practice, someone told me that Ginsburg’s work feels devoid of an awareness of the context from which he creates. This is perhaps valid. But to that I also say (by way of Lawrence Weiner);  “Bad artists believe that what everybody told them is the thing to do, and that’s where they get in trouble. Good artists don’t believe it. A good artist does not use the standard solutions. They do what they want because being an artist is one of the freest things in the world.”

And talking about good artists — Boytchie!!! I love how his small pinkish paintings; UNTITLED (QUICKDRAW PART I) and UNTITLED (QUICKDRAW PART II), hung high above eye level at the Everard Read booth, commanding attention. Although he works in a very different mode, Boytchie reminds me of Maroon. Both artists have the ability to address intense, often thorny issues while delivering remarkably subtle work—and in Boytchie’s case, tinged with humour.  It’s hard to reconcile the rigour and intensity of his work with the fact that his practice is a fairly young one. I have great faith in Boytchie.

Cathy Abraham and Morne Visagie’s presentation at Locus was a standout. Focusing on clean lines, limited colours and geometric shapes, this minimal approach created order and harmony, while subtly hinting at an underlying unease just beneath the surface. Titled ‘A Repeated Refrain’, the showcase highlighted material and thematic resonances between the two artists. Abraham’s use of softer materials; book linen and cotton,  contrasted with Visagie’s use of hard materials; brass and marble, both rooted in repetition as a central mode. For me, their work speaks to a kind of re-materialisation—a heightened awareness and perhaps even return to tangible forms, where physicality takes center stage. These are beautiful works of lyrical precision and diamond-hard clarity but they are also intimidating to me. I once told Abraham that sometimes when I see her sculptural works, the verticality, I think of Richard Serra. 

Guns & Rain’s booth featuring Ann Gollifer, Hannah Macfarlane, Isheanesu Dondo, and Zenaéca Singh, was a multigenerational conversation that offered something compelling and distinct. Gollifer’s work feels connected to a narrative of space and absence, Macfarlane’s exploration of place and identity draws on deep layers of personal history while Dondo’s loose, freeform marks on paper—scribbles almost—draw a tension between chaos and order. Singh’s practice, with its references to family archives, reminded me of Kara Walker in its ghostly evocation of historical figures and the psychological weight carried by her use of materials like sugar. Singh — so conceptually rigorous and strikingly precise — is one to watch closely. 

I was happy to learn of the work of Eva Obodo, the Nigerian artist presented by Art Formes, whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and mixed media. Obodo’s dark, layered, and complex relief paintings, evoking Nigeria’s mining-ravaged landscapes, made me reflect on the long history of Nigerian artists engaging with sculpture, evoking Okwui Enwenzor’s view of art steeped in hybridity and metissage reworked to capture the polycentric and polysemic aspects of new configurations. Many other wonderful configurations will not make this article. I think of  Khoushoua El Gohary, whose work immediately made me think of the great American painter Clementine Hunter. I think of Anthony Ngoya, whose eerie images, drawn from family albums and urban scraps, explore diasporic longing. I think of Lerato Shadi’s winding red lines at the blank booth, the Rorke’s Drift tapestries as part of GENERATIONS, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s drawings at Goodman Gallery, Natalie Paneng at Galarie Eigen + Art and the winner of “Tomorrows/Today” Prize Agnes Essonti Luque whose practice, inspired by Black feminist thinkers, offers the possibility to reimagine history and personal memory through dreams of post colonial futures. 

Curation, at its best, challenges the conventional boundaries of display, encouraging us to rethink the interactions between works and the spaces they occupy. It allows us to compare and contrast different modalities of display, not just as a matter of aesthetic arrangement, but as a means to disrupt the way we engage with art and maybe even with each other. A well-curated intervention provides a way of existing in the ‘in-between,’ where we can explore the spaces of ambiguity, contradiction and multiplicity. In this sense, the 12th Edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair was a perfect reminder of how ‘acts of display’ can spark useful contradiction and ambiguity.