The following is a conversation between Nkgopoleng Moloi and David Mann, following the 2025 edition of the FNB Art Joburg and Contra.Joburg, the immersive visual art experience with visits across the city, including Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, Rand club, Transwerke, WLM Marshalltown and Asisebenze Art Gallery. 

DM: I’ve been a fan of what Contra is doing for a while now, back when they went by ‘Open Studios’. I think the idea is simple and appealing: Reach out to a bunch of independent artists and organisations, get them to open up their studios and spaces for a weekend, and then invite the public to hop on a shuttle and engage in two days of studio visits, tours, and exhibitions. 

Mostly, I love the fact that it short-cuts the commercial art market model, bypassing galleries, auction houses and other art dealerships, and connecting buyers with artists, directly. There’s something quite wonderful about the idea of someone walking into an artist’s studio, having a conversation with them about their work, their process, their way of engaging ideas and materials, and then purchasing an artwork out of the studio then and there. 

But there is also the element of being in the city, and moving through it, disrupting the frazzled urban circuitry of a usual trip into town to see art — onto the highway and into town for a quick visit to the Standard Bank Gallery or The Centre for the Less Good Idea and straight back out again — and spending an entire morning moving between galleries, studios and coffee shops in the CBD. 

It’s not perfect, though. Contra struggles with audiences. Crowds are thin, and you get the sense that a good chunk of them are just there to explore historic spaces in the city, like the Rand Club or the maze-like floors of August House. It’s part of the draw, sure, but the aim is also to get people to buy art, to invest in the art-makers in the city rather than exclusively viewing their work in the suburbs. The other major issue is around general curation and presentation. Part of the charm of a festival like Contra is entering an artist’s studio and seeing how they work, how they set up their space, but the fair needs to provide more support for artists when it comes to advising them on how to display their work, or perhaps selecting which works to show and why. Perhaps that’s what you lose when you cut out the dealerships? 

NM: That’s fascinating. Art Logic recently hosted a free online global conference with over 50 speakers and 15 sessions, connecting art dealers, artists, writers, thinkers, etc. One of their panel topics was: “Is social capital the gallery’s real value proposition?” which I found productive and a reminder to think about what value is and how it circulates. I think it’s important to ask these questions of existing models of the support structures around art making and sales of artworks. For too long, their value propositions have remained unquestioned, but as it becomes tougher for artists and cultural workers to survive through their work, it becomes crucial to reflect on where power and value lie and how they are generated. I guess it is hopeful then that you see that mediation through curation. 

There’s so much else I want to respond to here. One thing that comes to mind as I read your reflections is the idea of a studio visit. I think in general, we’ve stopped engaging with artists’ studios as a way to learn their process, sensibility and other incidental things that you find out by being surrounded by half thoughts and half works. I was thinking about how we write as well. Very rarely do we engage the artist in their studio before or after an exhibition. Perhaps part of this is because artist too learnt a language of how to frame their work to make it “more interesting” (the age of discourse) – which means that when you speak to them, sometimes you’re getting a regurgitation of what they think you want to hear from them as opposed to what they are actually interested in. 

I wonder if curators, writers, and the public in general now have a different relationship with the idea of a studio visit, and whether they are excited enough by it to want to spend time there. For me, this is the potential of Contra. I don’t know if you remember when August House used to have Sunday studio visits about once a month. It used to be incredibly packed, interesting, and I think it resulted in some sales as well. There was always this incredible energy and expectation of what you might see and hear.

Outside of these infrastructural and organisational questions, would you say you saw some interesting things? Can you tell me a bit about them since I was not there? 

Senzeni Marasela talks about her work. Photograph by Siyabonga Vilakazi

DM: Contra feels like a scaled-up version of those Sunday studio visits at August House. You see a lot, and although it’s at your own pace, you end up moving quite quickly if you want to visit all of the spaces. Spaces like Bag Factory are good for this kind of viewing. It’s one floor of about 15 or so studios, and the spaces are always presented well. 

Smiso Cele, who was awarded the Cassirer Welz Award about a week prior, had just moved into his space, which already had a few of his works on paper up on the wall. I had already seen his sculptural work at Ellis House – elongated, warped shovels that move along the walls and crawl across the floor – and these prints and drawings feel like great accompaniments to his sculptural practice. They’re playing with the distortion of time and narrative in a similar way, full of wormholes and notes in the margins, almost like schematics or companion readers for the sculptures.  

Levy Pooe’s been at Bag Factory for a while. He’s also a Cassirer Welz award-winner (2020), and it was great to see how his newer work has shifted slightly since being at Bag. It’s smaller in scale and plays with cut-outs and collage – an attempt at pushing back against the flatness of the canvas, he said. 

At Transwerke, the studios are small and the crowds were large, so I only popped into a few studios. Phumlani Ntuli had a selection of his small prints up that seemed to be selling well. The Arts Company Soweto had an informal showing of their portfolio — Nkhensani Rihlampfu through to Molefe Thwala, who both bring an incredible tactility to their work — and one of the larger, ground-floor studios had a group exhibition of emerging painters on. It’s interesting to think back to Contra, because what comes to mind first is always the conversations I had or overheard — genuinely curious people chatting to artists about how something is made or if there’s a story behind the work — whereas with Art Joburg I recall the work itself very clearly and none of the chatter, which is largely just small-talk and social upkeep.   

During FNB Art Joburg, I was interested in the events orbiting the fair as well — the so-called Open City programme, only there wasn’t any programme, really, so I just spent Saturday morning driving around and visiting the sites I knew had things on — Goodman, Gallery 2, David Krut, Keyes Art Mile, Latitudes Centre for the Arts. It was all in the suburbs and quiet, too. Besides Everard Read, who always seems to have visitors, I was often the only one in the gallery. 

I guess part of the problem is that institutions like art fairs have no real connection to the city to begin with. They’re a floating platform all year, except for the four days they’re at a convention centre, and when they try to ‘activate’ or ‘open’ the city, they’re just throwing a lot of money and production at the few institutions with roots in the CBD, but it’s insincere. The Cape Town Art Fair only gets away with it because the Cape Town CBD is more navigable than Johannesburg’s, and most of the galleries are within a 5km radius of one another. Art Joburg tried to host a bunch of events in Maboneng one year, but it ended up being mostly an invite-only affair because nobody wanted to spend 400-something Rand plus a R200 Uber into town to listen to Hans Ulrich Obrist talk for an hour. I remember the year that Turbine Art Fair was at the Oxford Parks building in Rosebank, they took a bunch of press down to the steps of the Radisson Red hotel which has a view down Oxford Road of the city’s architecture — the Hillbrow tower, Ponte tower etc — and told us that this was a way of maintaining a connection to their original venue in Newtown. I mean…       

Am I being too pessimistic? To be clear, I do think that art fairs can and should spend their time and resources activating the pre-existing arts infrastructure in the cities they occupy. I just don’t think any of them are doing it very well at the moment. 

NM: Lol. I have to confess, I would love to hear Hans Ulrich Obrist talk for an hour. I’ve highlighted “invite only” affairs because I think part of the crisis is the struggle between opening things up to make art more accessible (because that’s how you nurture new collectors, and I guess it looks good on social media when there’s a stampede at events) and, on the other hand, wanting to maintain a kind of exclusivity. I don’t want to blame the internet for everything, but it is genuinely surprising to me how much of institutions, artists or galleries’ strategy is informed by how things will look on socials. Sometimes I feel as though the art object isn’t really the point or the catalyst for conversation, that the exchange is something else – the art object is merely a stand-in. 

This is why there’s so much bad art, I think — the turnaround and pace are too quick, and there’s simply no space for a lull. I was having a conversation with Ashraf Jamal, and he said something so simple, but it stayed with me. He said that his “brain is long” – I like that, this idea that for things to make sense, you need a long brain. Things have to go through multiple filters, connections, contradictions, doubt, etc, before you can claim any kind of coherence. I see a lot of artworks that are the opposite. I don’t think you can just read one Fred Moten article and then build an entire art practice on fugitivity. The same applies to writing and discourse. 

In a slightly more positive light, I really enjoy it when you can see an artist working on their ideas and experimenting over a long period of time. I think Unathi Mkonto comes to mind. The work is conceptual for sure, but you also just get a sense of someone really interested in form and playing around with it in a sincere way.  I like his work. I also just really love Jemila Isa. I love how she renders her figures; it’s so strange and delicate. They make me smile. 

Jemila Isa, Sea Spirit 2, 2025, Oil on paper

DM: I’m keen on hearing your thoughts on the work at Art Joburg this year — any clear themes or threads you picked up on, intentional or incidental? — and also your experience managing a booth at this year’s fair — were folks buying, engaging? Are audiences curious about art or just there for the vibes? 

NM: I enjoyed working the booth for ArtThrob, especially on Friday, because that’s when you meet a lot of students. Some of them you have to prompt to get comfortable enough to hold a conversation, but once they get over the initial fear, we had some lovely conversations. A lot of them in high school told me they were learning about Renaissance art, and when I asked them about art from the continent, they spoke to me about what they called “Egyptian art” or “traditional art”. It didn’t seem like they had a good sense of contemporary art from the continent, but that could also just be because they are in grade 8 or 10. Perhaps the curriculum changes. What was really fun was chatting with a group of students who were currently learning about printmaking. We had wonderful conversations about the different techniques, and I told them a bit about the works we had in our booth — Warren Maroon, Bonolo Kavula, Bella Knemeyer, and Unathi Mkonto.

There were a few people who knew little about art, which I really love. I think this is part of the point, but these interactions are few and far between. And those who knew a lot about art already had their favourites, and that moment of recognition seemed pleasurable for them. 

In that regard, I feel quite positive. Sales-wise, not really. You have a few sales, but nothing to get insanely excited about. The  ROI is definitely negative. 

DM: I loved Friday for similar reasons. It was great seeing all the students engaging so excitedly and candidly with the work. At the Everard Read booth, I was looking at a portrait by Bambo Sibiya, and a kid came up to me, incredulous, and said, “Can you believe that this is R72 000? For a painting?” and I said, “Well, if you had R72 000 to spare, would you buy it?” and he responded, “Probably. It’d make me happy to see it in my house every day,” which was a sincere moment amongst all the noise and flourish of the fair. 

NM: I love that. 

DM: Saturday was hard to bear. It was packed, everyone was drunk on Krone, and just there to socialise. I asked a few of the booths whether the festive mood translated into better sales or even just more engagement, and they just laughed. The talks were difficult, too. As a rule, I never attend art fair talks, but a friend was on one of the panels this year, so I went through and it was, unsurprisingly, impossible to engage with. The sound was poor, and the cacophony from the fair bled into the mezzanine level where the talks were happening, so you couldn’t really hear much. Audiences were coming and going throughout the talk, talking through the panel, taking phone calls. It was quite a thing to see — a little like the lizard scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — and it solidified a feeling I’ve had for a while, which is that talks and panel discussions at art fairs are really just there as intellectual garnish. Whether they’re engaged with or not is inconsequential to the fair.  

NM: This is sad to hear. This might sound like I’m proposing that we police ourselves, but I’m not. I think a sense of professionalism is really necessary in our industry. There needs to be a sense of, objectively, what the expectations are for how people should engage with each other around work. Especially if we consider the work we do to mean something. I am guilty of this, too, in that by being friendly with many people in the industry, I can sometimes be overly familiar and informal in ways that may be problematic. I can’t imagine any other panel or talk (maybe politics) where people would engage with it as if they were “just hanging out”. Tell me more. 

DM: Presentation-wise, it felt like the fair had fewer booths this year. SMAC, Whatiftheworld, Guns & Rain, Southern Guild, Reservoir, David Krut and Ebony were just a few of the regular South African galleries that weren’t present, and it made for a more navigable fair and slightly more well-presented booths than usual. But what of text? Art fairs are not the place where any meaningful reading is done, I know, but to provide us with nothing but a QR code in most instances — no wall texts, blurbs, barely any printed out texts — feels like a telling disinvestment, on the part of the fair, in the relationship between visual art and the written word. 

A positive sentiment amongst many was the range and quality of galleries from the rest of the continent. TBP Collective put forward a great selection of sculpture, painting and photography. First Floor Gallery had a brilliant group of painters, and Musa Ganiyy’s work at Windsor Gallery was full of life.  

Mary Sibande, Sophie in Attitude Devant 2025 at the FNB Art Joburg 2025. Photo: Duduzile Khumalo

NM: There’s a lot more I want to talk about regarding the fair itself. I feel it necessary to point out some things that I thought felt right, too. For instance, Mary Sibande’s Sophie Ballerina sculpture (Sophie in Attitude Devant) really captured imaginations. It was such a simple but I think effective way to continue the journey and story of marginal bodies, invisibility and claiming space through Sophie’s life. Very nice. I also don’t think I will get tired of seeing Santu Mofokeng’s work. I just had to remind myself that it’s important for certain works to keep reappearing in this way – for someone who is attending the fair for the first time or knows little about contemporary art work, that might have been their first interaction with this important work. I also want to give a nod to Pulp Paperworks, with whom you have worked. They had a wonderful selection of interesting publications and zines, including Zara Julius’ new project, A funeral for, the beautiful hand-bound art book that explores the entanglements of death and life.

Can we talk a bit about the aftermath of the fair? Beginning with the Art Africa article by Adilson De Oliveira. But before we jump there can you tell me a bit about the Lagos intervention at the back of the fair – the livestreaming? I was so busy working the booth that I did not have time to engage with the project properly. 

DM: Sibande’s sculpture was fantastic. It was one of the most photographed works at the fair, so it always had a crowd, but if you managed to get a quiet moment to watch it turn, it was very impactful. The livestream was part of a project called AFROPortals, by a US-based group, ‘Artist as First Responder’, in collaboration with Still Artist Residency, Ayana V Jackson’s residency programme based in Ellis House. It was a live stream that connected folks at the Fair to artist studios and spaces in other parts of the world, including Nigeria, Mexico, Rwanda, and Brazil. I don’t know if there was a prompt or a theme per sé, but what ended up happening was artists in Lagos, for example, would be showing their work — canvases, sketches, notebook scribblings — to people at the Fair, who would talk about it and ask questions: “Hold it up higher. I like the colours. Is that a picture of your girlfriend?” It was just a very playful and organic little part of the fair that I was grateful for. It was also tucked between Natalie Paneng’s and Robin Rhode’s solo booths, which made for a corner of the convention centre that was quite engaging.

NM: Someone’s always going to like the colours….very cool.

Regarding the article. There is such a huge shift in how I receive Adilson De Oliveira’s text now versus the first time I read it on the Monday it got published (8th September). Naturally, I felt more excitement and intensity. The more I read it, the less bothered I am by it. Perhaps it’s because I spent most of that week embroiled in conflicting feelings, thoughts, and ideas (some well-considered and relevant, and others completely random and weird) through social media and private conversations. I think I may have allowed myself to be swept up a bit, lol. What surprises me as I think about how the whole thing played out is how quick we are to ingest and egest, often with a lot of energy and a lot of vigour, but not necessarily rigour. And I was equally surprised by the false sense of urgency that the article created. Whether you agree with De Oliveira or not, it seems impossible to imagine that what he wrote in that article was truly surprising to anyone in the industry. There’s a lot of due diligence that the publication failed to perform in releasing that article (simple fact-checking for one), and then seemingly being absent from any kind of follow-up conversation that the article necessitated. When I read it for the first time, it did not sit well with me, not because it was not valid, but because it felt totalising. To speak of canons and yet to clearly trace a narrative through a very particular viewpoint felt lacking to me. But now, when I think about it, I’m less angry about this. How else can a writer or a thinker express themselves apart from putting disclaimers with every single sentence that they write? I mean, here we are, you and me, reflecting through our own specificity and experiences on the fair and the week.  In the same vein, it is problematic to be totalising and emphatic when you have not done the rigorous work of making sure that your reading is not ahistorical and apolitical.  

I thought a lot about an exhibition that POOL staged in Cape Town,  “Things take time, and time takes things.” In particular, I thought about and went back to a text Ben Albertyn used to frame his response to this exhibition. He referenced a text by Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Kornbluh examines why speed, flow, and direct expression now dominate cultural style and what the implications of this might be. She speaks of transparency and instantaneity, “Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. “Flow” is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them”. 

Political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. I like this idea of time, collective will and inspiring ideas. What I want to see more of is less reactivity (sometimes violent) and more staying with the questions – staying in the hold, staying with the discomfort that goes beyond just the heat of the moment. If the concerns we are raising are serious to us, I would like to see us spend more time asking questions and thinking about how we solve them (together). 

In that week of many pings and WhatsApps and screenshots, accusations and muck, I found myself returning to a conversation between Darby English and Helen Molesworth in which they speak about listening as a form of witnessing and the necessity to be curious about the self and the other. 

I would really love to hear your thoughts on this. I’m so moved by these ideas of stickiness and curiosity, as well as trans as a mode of relating and problem-solving. The most incredible thing to come out of the last few days for me is a reminder to ask more questions. It’s too early to draw conclusions, but yeah, I don’t think you can really listen if you’re not asking questions.

DM: I echo a lot of your sentiments. The Art Africa article and the responses it sparked have been very noisy, and I’ve struggled to stay with my own thoughts. I’ve been interested in the general tone of online chatter in response to this conversation, and it feels like there really is, as English says, a calcification. A hardening of emotion and opinion. It seems like people are embracing anger and frustration because they’re emotions that yield great momentum — they have force, enact change, they get things done — but it’s curiosity, playfulness, vulnerability, and other key parts of making, thinking about, and engaging art that fall to the side when we lead with more urgent emotions. 

I don’t think I’ve ever understood art to be a first-response medium, but whenever there’s some crisis or outrage or collective hardship — the pandemic always comes to mind — there’s an expectation for artists, writers, and “cultural workers” to be first on the scene, armed with a response, a solution, a remedy. The best thing to do is, as you say, to remain curious and open-hearted, and that takes time. That’s a big part of criticism, right? To stay with an artwork, an object or a performance until it changes you, unsettles you, or asks you to take a new approach, ask a different question, and then connect this encounter with the world more broadly.  

To circle back to the conversation around things like Open City,  I published a short story at the start of the year about the ‘SaxonGold Art Fair, which tries to ‘activate the city’ by commissioning a private performance in the detritus of the Bree Street explosion in Johannesburg. It was a way of voicing many of the frustrations I have around how art fairs lay claim to the cities they take place in, in extractive and inauthentic ways. As is increasingly the case, I found fiction to be a far more generative mode than conventional criticism, online handwringing, or adrenalised opinion pieces. In general, I find that fiction is a tool that allows for a very productive way of embracing uncertainty and inviting a form of meaning-making or storytelling that is co-authored. It’s something I’m trying to bring more of to my writing in general. 

Writers’ Block (Christa Dee, Bárbara Rousseaux, and I) hosted a talk with Lawrence Lemaoana at Keyes Art Mile a week after Art Joburg to unpack some of these topics as well. One of the main takeaways was that there are always productive alternatives to the institutions or parts of the industry that aren’t working for us anymore. Collectives like Occupying the Gallery as an antidote to stale curation, or open studios as an alternative to art fair models. We just need to look a bit harder for them.  

NM: Thank you for being part of that important work, too.

Well, Dave, this conversation is over four thousand words long. I really appreciate this gesture of thinking together, and I am 100% in agreement about the need to find more authentic, collective and generative ways of engaging with each other. We should do this more often. 

DM: Thank you! And likewise.