We reached out to our contributors for their winter reading and listening recommendations. Here is what they had to say:

David Mann 

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year? 


I’ve been enjoying the collection of South African long-form, narrative journalism, ‘The Interpreters’. It’s been a necessary reminder of the value of sitting with a story or an obsession, no matter how big or small it might seem, and seeing where it takes you. 

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment? 

Nicolas Jaar’s Piedras albums are great to write to, but they’re also little sonic essays that I’ve enjoyed ‘reading’ and returning to. Tracks like ‘Rio de las Tumbas’ in particular are like abstract readings around global conflict and geo-politics, without any of the bore-you-to-tears jargon of the academy.

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year? 

Nicolas Jaar, Qondiswa James, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Bella Knemeyer, Stacy Hardy, and Mankebe Seakgoe. Each of them makes work that has been an essential reminder of the incredible ability of a single story, gesture, mark, or movement — collectively held — to exercise the empathy muscle.  

Nkgopoleng Moloi

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year?

In April of this year, Knopf published Joan Didion’s ‘Notes to John’ —  a series of diary entries by the writer from 1999 to mid-2003 detailing conversations with her therapist. Didion, who is always thought of as being removed and sober in her writing, is incredibly vulnerable in these notes. I haven’t allowed myself to think about the ethical implications of publishing them, but I am deeply moved by her analysis of her sense of being in the world. 

In one part, she speaks about binaries, relating to her daughter’s struggles with alcoholism and why she (Didion) has a problem with structures like AA. The theatrical failure, she points out is that AA functions on an ‘all or nothing’ logic – you want a drink and give in and don’t just end up with a hangover and the case of the guilts as you would in real life, you end up in the gutter or in a bar picking somebody up who’s going to hit you. When I read this, I thought, yes!!! This is in some ways at the heart of any flawed construct you can think of (built on fear), the binary is stark and the price to pay ALWAYS seems huge….but ofcourse in real life things are really not that tenuous. I think about this a lot when I write, how tightly to hold on to things and how and when to let them go. 

Also, those notes read as if Didion knew she would have an audience. She had a real embodied understanding of what a good sentence is.

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment? 

I spent a year waiting for Benjamin Clementine to release ‘Sir Introvert and the Featherweights, ’ an album he promised his fans. Instead of a full album, he shared two okayish songs and a few minutes of screentime in Steve McQueen’s war drama ‘Blitz’…bless them both. 

Instead of enjoying Clementine, I found myself returning to Warhaus, who won me over with their 2022 album ‘Ha Ha Heartbreak’. Throughout that project, you can feel Maarten Devoldere’s pain, but it is also wrapped in this generous, warm embrace that reminds you that everything is temporary. The new album ‘Karaoke Moon’ is just as inspired, deep, and funny and at times completely ridiculous.

Podcast-wise, I love well-researched storytelling, if I can call it that. I think PJ Vogt of ‘Search Engine’ is a breath of fresh air, and I think the guys at ‘Radio Lab’ and ‘This American Life’ are so smart. I also love a good trashy podcast, like a true crime podcast – also haven’t allowed myself to consider the ethics of these types of podcasts. 

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year?

I think a lot about Hilma AF Klint and her seances. I enjoyed writing an exhibition text for Guy Simpson’s latest show, ‘Running Parallel’ and think about that work often. I’ve been thinking a lot about Richard Serra (and that generation of American artists) since his death. There isn’t a day when it is not a good idea to think about Ruth Asawa. I’ve said this for years. 

Robert Hamblin

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year? 

‘Biological Exuberance’ by Bruce Bagemihl, Ph.D. Ostensibly an encyclopaedia produced to update natural history facts with the queer parts about animals, this opus was excluded by researchers to the public for the last 200 years. But the book goes much further and shows how animals do ALL the same sexual and gender stuff humans do, tender and terrible. We’ve ALL been lied to. His work has been the pivot of my own for the last two years.

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment?

Anything I can find on poet, performer and trans feminine person Alok V Menon. I am particularly interested in their view of violent men. Menon argues that the violence perpetrated by men on queer people and women is located in the grief and loss of their own feminine. 

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year?

Collen Mfazwe, photographer and transman, whose iconic self portrait was taken up by the Smithsonian museum in Washington, USA recently. The work shows his beautiful face, resigned expression, sensual arm up and his chest that bears the surgical result of its reconstruction. Mfazwe continues to produce work showing a compassionate view on his painfully earned masculinity.

Lukho Witbooi

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year?

I’ve been spending a lot of time with ‘Critique of Black Reason’ by Achille Mbembe. It is a dense book that keeps revealing new layers every time I read it. What stands out to me is how Mbembe shows that Blackness is not something natural but something that was created as a way to divide and control the world. He explains how this way of thinking, dividing people into Black and White, human and non-human, was invented during colonialism and still shapes how the world works today. I find it interesting that while Blackness was first used to oppress, it has also become a space for new ideas, resistance, and connection.

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment?

I remember when I first heard that André 3000 was releasing ‘New Blue Sun’. What struck me most was how he spoke about no longer being interested in being a wordsmith. He simply wanted to play the flute. When the album finally came out, I listened to it at midnight in a state of meditation. After that, I chose to return to it during life’s quiet moments, such as doing the dishes in the morning, taking scenic drives, reading a book, and especially when I was writing with a fresh cup of Bootlegger coffee by my side. The music helped me find a steady flow where my own thoughts could move freely and blend naturally with my emotions.

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year?

I have become quite obsessed with Lisette Forsyth’s work. I have been following her for some time now, and what really draws me in is how she overlays old maps of South Africa with painted portraits of ordinary people from the present. I love how she works with found materials like vintage maps, ledger pages, and discarded documents to create something that feels like an untangling of history. It feels as if her figures are being loosened from the weight of the past, finding new life and space to breathe. At the same time, there is a constant warmth in how she captures everyday South African life. The people she paints — workers, families, street scenes — shine through with honesty and quiet beauty. Her work brings history and the present into the same space, but it is the present that shines the brightest.

Ben Albertyn

What book/text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year?

I’m late to ‘Except for Breath’, the collection of essays Lucie Bestall put out earlier this year, but I’m currently catching up, and she’s just so good. She’ll skip between a personal essay about a fuckboy who stirs drinks with his index finger and a study of the various depictions of Christ’s torture without skipping a beat. I envy her swiftness and her sentences. We’re lucky to have her around. Besides that, reading hasn’t inspired me much of late, so I’ve been rereading old favourites like ‘Pedro Páramo’ by Juan Rulfo, an essential Bencore text. 

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment?

Music has been my medium of choice this winter, lots of confessional stuff, that’s been the mood. Sad East Coast rappers (like this one) have been hitting the spot, and sad ambient/hip hop/spoken word stuff from Northern England, like the new Rainy Miller album. I’ve also been returning to Aaron-Carl’s 2002 Detroit House breakthrough, ‘Uncloseted’, which still feels raw, almost punk. Complete emotional honesty is the only thing that’s really hitting for me at the moment. 

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year?

The Cape Town galleries are in winter mode, so my experience of visual art has been mostly laptop-based. My film & video exploration has been favouring the 60s New York underground, particularly the work of Edward Owens and Robert Beavers. Owens’ story is especially mind-boggling: a kid from the south side of Chicago who made four experimental masterpieces before the age of 20 and then retired! I don’t understand it. A teenager! How? Beavers is the opposite. He has devoted his entire life to an epic film cycle called ‘My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure’, of which I have only seen parts, but what he achieves with editing feels like dark magic.

Zada Hanmer 

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year? 

A book that has heavily influenced my thinking and writing for the last year is ‘Lesser Violence’, edited by Amie Soudien. There is an essay included in the first volume of this incredible publication that I find myself returning to all the time. It’s called ” ‘This song is for…’ Inhabiting the scratch, performing the rhapsodic”  by Gabrielle Goliath. 

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment?

While writing, I’ve been listening to ‘The Gold’ by Phoebe Bridgers and the Manchester Orchestra. I came across it by accident and was captivated by its beautifully melancholic atmosphere. 

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year?

I have been thinking a lot about Mankebe Seakgoe’s art because of how similar it is to writing — and the way space and line interact in her works is mesmerising. Bronwyn Davis’ use of colour has drawn me back to their work many times. And finally, for some reason, Penny Siopis ‘Shadow Shame Again’ is always in the back of my mind because of what it represents. The message of that piece in particular is urgent, angry, and completely necessary. 

Hamzeh Alfarahneh

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year? 

Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment? 

Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Revisionist History’.

The podcast is a journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Every episode re-examines something from the past — an event, a person, an idea, even a song — and asks whether we got it right the first time, tracing and exploring how the past often deserves a second look. 

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year? 

Brazilian constructivist Lygia Clark.

Nkhensani Mkhari 

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year?

I have a ritual where I read ‘Alternate Names for Black Boys’ by Danez Smith every morning. I’m currently reading Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s ‘The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses’. The core thesis in the text explores how gender as a social category did not exist in pre-colonial Yoruba society in the way it exists in the West. Oyěwùmí argues that colonialism introduced a gendered ontology, where previously identity was shaped more by seniority, lineage, and role than by biological sex. She introduces the idea of the “biological determinism” of Western thought as a colonial imposition, contrasting it with Yoruba epistemology, where social roles are more fluid and relational. I think the text is seminal in discussions of embodiment, non-binary systems of social classification, and the politics of visibility.

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment?

I’ve been listening to a lot of Pharoah Sanders’ Elevation Live (1974). There’s a track titled ‘Greetings to Saud’. I can’t get over it and always have it on repeat. It reminds me that sometimes meaning is in the gesture, not the explanation. It’s in the loop. In the breath. In the refusal to conclude.

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year?

I’ve been returning to photography because of my work with Phototool. I’m coming back to the work of Sabelo Mlangeni and Santu Mofokeng. There’s a beauty in how the photograph makes the invisible linger. Photography at its most powerful is not about capturing the world, but about holding space for its afterlives.

Emily Freedman

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year? 


Roland Barthes’ ‘Camera Lucida’. This text often stands next to Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ in terms of quintessential reading, related to photo theory. Ultimately, in pointing out the inability to separate photograph from referent, Barthes argues for the understanding of the photograph as a signifier without a signified. I found this interesting and compelling.

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment? 

Various interviews with Ocean Vuong. With the release of his second novel, ‘The Emperor of Gladness’, Vuong’s press tour has included various interviews and podcasts unpacking the ideas fuelling the novel. Particularly, he explores the notion of kindness without hope. In Vuong’s understanding of the world, the binary of things, being either good or bad, collapses.

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year? 

Lindokuhle Sobekwa. Since I read ‘I Carry Her Photo With Me’ for the first time, earlier this year, my mind has continuously called back to the work. It tells its story so effectively, visually and theoretically. It’s coherent, impactful and layered. I especially loved how Sobekwa qualified his use of the photograph, turning the medium itself, the act of taking the photograph, into a mimetic gesture – one which resists the phenomenon of disappearance.

Ashraf Jamal

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year?

One by my bedside, the other at Exclusive Books, which I can’t afford to buy, is a study of Impressionism and a biography of Monet. If they matter, it’s because the vision of the world both books convey is loving and magical.

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment?

I started my second round of talks for the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF). On the 27th of June, I spoke with the team of MADEYOULOOK – Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho, about terraformation, rain and spirituality. JCAF’s podcasts revolve around ecology, structures, human settlements, and the place of art therein.

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year?

William Turner, it being the 250th anniversary of his birth, and because of his love of light, which anticipates Impressionism. Against Turner, I’m bugged by Mark Rothko, whose ideal viewing arena resembles a panic room, with the doors closed and windows shuttered. Writing about Turner, I am the lover. Writing about Rothko, I am the enemy. 

Christa Dee

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year? 

‘Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City’ edited by Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden. The book has been very informative in relation to city life and urban living, particularly at this moment. 

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment? 

I am currently listening to the album ‘Nabuma Rubberband’ by Little Dragon. A forever fave.

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year? 

Bulumko Mbete, but also textile work in general. 

Nolan Stevens

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year?

I found myself returning to two books lately. Zakes Mda’s 2019 novel, ‘The Zulus of New York’,  and Tumi Mogorosi’s ‘De Aesthetic: writing with and from the black sonic’, from 2021. Each has become a source which has informed my practices as writer, curator and art advisor in different ways. 

The former is a novel based on the history of “Farini’s Friendly Zulus”, a group of Zulu men who were taken from their home to perform in “freak shows”, then known as “human curiosities”- initially in Britain and then later in the United States. The latter is a book of essays from jazz drummer, visual artist and thinker, Tumi Mogorosi. This compilation of essays unpacks the influence and impact of the creative expression of black musicians, such as Louis  Moholo-Moholo, Brenda Fassie, Louis Armstrong and Sade. These musicians are used to illustrate the limitations thrust upon black creatives and by so doing demonstrate the far-reaching effects which the effect of these limitations have.                                                                                                                                                                                                              

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment?

I’m not sure if this is because I’m getting older, but I find myself listening to a lot more jazz from the 50s, 60s, and 70s nowadays. Jazz has always been a part of my life, but almost as a peripheral influence to the other genres of music I’d listen to. No doubt a side effect of being the youngest in my family. Musicians like Michael Franks, Tania Maria, or Bobby McFerrin have all become regulars in my playlists; their poetically illustrative and emotive lyrics are inspirational and aspirational elements to how I’d like a future version of myself to write. Then, of course, there is the instrumental side of jazz-fusion, which often acts as a soundtrack to my writing practice; here, old school jazz cats the likes of Bob James take centre stage.  

As far as podcasts go, I am a regular listener to two podcasts: ‘Unframed Podcast’ and ‘ARTdacity’. Both are South African podcasts which focus on the local visual art scene, but each inhabits a different space within the contemporary art landscape. ‘Unframed Podcast’ was initially hosted by artist and photographer Anthea Pokroy for the first three seasons and joined by arts writer Nkgopoleng Moloi in season four. The format mostly follows an interview structure, engaging with artists, curators, gallerists and other industry experts. An aspect that I particularly enjoy about this podcast is that the interviews usually feel like conversations between friends. 

Whilst ARTDdacity follows a similar method, format-wise, the approach in this podcast embodies that of a novice explorer of the arts industry. This isn’t a negative but part of the podcast’s charm; as this podcast isn’t hosted by a seasoned arts insider, but hosted, instead, by former Miss South Africa and media personality, Jo-Ann Strauss. Whereas Unframed feels relatable to me because I’m also a product of art school, Jo-Ann’s ARTdacity tackles topics often from an unexpected perspective. She doesn’t hide her unfamiliarity with the space, and that makes it enduring.  

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year?

Usha Seejarim has made a few recurring cameos in my writing this year, and looking back, I realise that she’s an artist I write about every few years. I hadn’t noticed this until this question.  Because I’m really drawn to conceptual thinking, Usha’s ability to seek out new artistic challenges, not only in her exploration of materiality, but in the formulation of ideas which result in the final forms we see, either in her gallery exhibitions or public space installations. Her latest Southern Guild solo showing, for example, was something I covered for three publications.  I think there’s something to be said about the advantages of actively following and engaging with someone’s artistic practice for a prolonged time. Personally, this has seen me taking part in workshops she’s facilitated, viewing multiple showings of her work, covering her practice and engaging in more than a few off-the-record conversations which had stretched for hours.   

Keely Shinners 

What book/ text are you currently reading or have read that is informing your thinking and writing this year?
‘Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son’s Suicide’ by Richard Boothby.
“The more I think about it, the more I’m struck by the basic idea. Knowing is in some important part about control. It’s less about being in the moment than it is about predicting the future. Love, on the contrary, is a creature of the present. Love can fuss and fidget about the future, but mostly out of fear. What love most desires is to revel in the deliciousness of Now. In that ecstatic present, love never wholly knows. It knows enough, and needs no more.”

What sound piece (podcast, music, etc) are you listening to that is informing your experience of art and life at the moment?
The Leanover by Life Without Buildings live at the Annandale Hotel

Which artist(s) have you found yourself returning to frequently this year?
Maggie Ellis