JULIE MEHRETU

Our guests on this episode are South African-born, U.S-based friends of more than 30 years: Stefan Simchowitz and David Altman. Their wide-ranging conversation explores everything from walking the line between collector and dealer, what success means in the art world and the promotion of cultural production from Africa.

As a platform for critical thinking, the Latitudes Podcast seeks to spark debate and provide our audience with a wide range of viewpoints from across the art ecosystem, even those that may ruffle feathers.

You have to resist the urge to neatly locate Nada Baraka’s art in an Egyptian context. The thirty-three-year-old artist was born in, lives and practices in Cairo, and indeed the sense of chaos that defines the compositions of her abstract paintings could represent the city's erosion of democratic values, political order and worsening social conditions.

In this episode, painter Cinga Samson speaks about home, spirituality, his inspirations, and, in light of his meteoric rise in the art world, the meaning of success.

Latitudes sits down with collector Namita Singh Thakur, founder of Art Curio - a not-for-profit foundation that is deeply involved in collecting works of emerging artists, women artists and artists from underrepresented backgrounds.

In this episode, Mark Read muses on a wide variety of subjects, from what palaeontology can teach us about art and humanity, to the role of galleries in a changing art ecosystem, and how the present is the most brilliant time to be alive in beautiful southern Africa.

While collaborations between artists and fashion, furniture or homeware designers are not uncommon in South Africa, there remains some confusion and even skepticism around the extent to which the disciplines of contemporary art and design can and should overlap.

In this episode, Sumayya Vally ruminates on topics such as the deep political power of beauty, how architecture affirms who we are in the world, and the often overlooked intelligence of early African architecture, which has the ability to connect us to each other, and to a higher power.

There is one artist whose works have remained divisive since they were unleashed onto the international stage in the early 1980s: Jean-Michel Basquiat.

All That She Carried is a large-scale exhibition in celebration of Women's Month. The show takes its name from Tiya Alicia Miles's New York Times bestseller, in which the historian "traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a testament to people who are left out of the archives."

One of the lesser explored aspects of textile art in African expression is an investigation into the use of abstraction. More precisely, what artistic, conceptual or ideological values textile art activate as opposed to, say, painting.

Cameron Platter’s pencil drawings are meticulous enlargements of quick, impulsive marker drawings and collages. The artist then carefully plots and reworks-into these digitally, before painstakingly translating them into pencil on paper.

The art world has experienced a paradigm shift, with independent artists, disruptive curators, and marginalised individuals challenging established norms. However, reforms should be cautious of historical naivety and outdated practices.

After the fantastic success of RMB Latitudes, our first physical event since 2019, Latitudes is excited to launch a second offline offering. Latitudes Centre for the Arts (LCA) is a physical, multi-purpose exhibition space in Johannesburg dedicated to the year-round promotion of artists and galleries on the continent.

Curators were always going to be absorbed into the art fair fray. Nevertheless, it is difficult, if not impossible, to marry the curatorial act with commercial imperatives, given dealers need to make sales to recoup the costs of participating and staying in business.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our very own podcast produced in partnership with iTOO Artinsure.