Features

Curating in the African context is rarely a singular pursuit. In South Africa, as is the case across much of the African continent, interest in curatorial practice is high, while sustainable opportunities and platforms for curators remain slim.

In this episode, Alastair  Meredith chats to Refiloe Mpakanyane about his fascination with South African modernist art; where it all started and why the genre remains the gift that keeps on giving to the South African public and the world.

Le Guin tells us that fiction can be like the carrier bag, a receptacle for all sorts of incidentally found things, and I want to venture that the paintings included in Hedwig Barry’s solo exhibition, Unrest, on show at Guns & Rain until 27 October, do the same thing. They too are tools “that [bring] energy home”.

The contemporary condition is such that there are no longer any art movements – even if there are discernible aesthetic or conceptual qualities characterising the art finding favour.

Capital Art is an art collection management service and the first focusing on empowering collectors of modern and contemporary African art.

In today's episode, host Refiloe Mpakanyane delves into why so many young artists multi-task and produce at the intimidating rate they do. In conversation with dynamic young artists and ANNA Award finalists, Nindya Bucktowar and Alexandra-Naledi Holtman, she explores whether this is a necessary adaptation to contemporary demands or a simple extension of their innate, intellectual curiosity.

Through the Glass, Sparkling delves deep into the multi-disciplinary practice of acclaimed South African artist, Frances Goodman, presenting a collection of stories, essays, and poems that intimately explore the central theme of mirrors and reflections.

My initiation into the world of Independent cultural production was a whirlwind affair, a rendezvous with the avant-garde Pool Space tucked away downtown on the corner of the ground floor of Ellis House back on the auspicious evening of March 15, 2015. The alchemical collision of minds behind this exhibition: Mandla Mlangeni - Jazz extraordinaire - and maestro of melodies, Shane Cooper, visionaries in their own right. This exhibition was woven into a series christened Starter Room.

Back in 2016, the South African artists William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace came together to found a space committed to creating and supporting experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary arts projects.

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.