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Since AI and the digitisation of art marketing have impacted art production and dealing, how have collectors benefitted?

With surprisingly limited local media coverage, 2022 marked some extraordinary moments for Black women artists from South Africa.

Dora Dalila Cheffi, a Finnish-Tunisian artist, belongs nowhere. We meet at the artists studio at the Cape Town Art Residency to discuss her self-portraits. A tall mirror is a striking studio tool. There, reversed, the artist sees herself.

The Swiss-English artist, Lawrence Calver, is in love with Rothko, though he is no painter. Sewing, dyeing, bleaching, are the integral elements in the creation of his art.

It is somewhat of an old-school notion that art must keep us in tune with the times. Art has equal value and sway when it channels utopias, and idylls. 

When Norwegian-based Zambian Artist Victor Mutelekesha began to conceive of a space that would function as a repository of the arts, it naturally followed that LuCAC would become a station that highlights the multiplicity of cultural identities present in the capital city.

Adesola Yusuf (Arclight) is a 25-year-old multidimensional artist from Lagos, Nigeria. His visually expressive work takes inspiration through the ages, from renaissance art, to modern minimalist, pop and internet art.

The book Mihloti ya Ntsako – Journeys with the Bongi Dhlomo Collection, is both a chronicling of a collection and a biography of its collector, the accomplished artist, curator and arts administrator, Bongiwe Dhlomo-Mautloa, better known as Ma Bongi Dhlomo.

"I spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant for artists to make, in a continuously disorienting world that is hungry for things that are bigger, better, faster, newer and shinier..." - Nkgopoleng Moloi

Based in Cape Town and entirely self taught, South African artist Jono Dry has worked for the last thirteen years on creating a practice centred around his large-scale hyperrealist graphite works.

The Social Impact Arts Prize awards artists who situate their practices in socially concerned conditions ranging from the environment and climate change to human relations and social pressures of an unequal society. Read about the 2022 winners.

David Mann explores the benefits writers gain from the collaborative and generative act of welcoming visual art into their narratives.

Everywhere, it seems, abstraction is the resurgent signifier. How so? Because we are tired of being told what to see and value? Because ours is a world riven by identity politics, split by extremism on the Left and Right, consumed by the spectre of fascism – by Absolutes.

Is it possible to hold an exhibition with only three paintings? More importantly, can you drum up an audience without disappointing them? Surprisingly, a Joburg-based curator, Clive Kellner, director of the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF), has managed to achieve both with the latest exhibition, Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities in the Global South.

Now that the rush to buy textile-based art has somewhat abated those who are making strides with this medium are easier to spot and appreciate.

Asian art markets rival western ones. Yet links between Africa and Asia seem to be only gradually taking shape, and doing so in institutional rather than commercial spheres.

Yana Barinova recently joined the viennacontemporary team as a Development Officer approaching the main statement this year: Ukraine. They discuss the importance of cultural heritage, Barinova's professional breakthroughs and the impact of war on the Ukrainian art and social sector.

Since relocating to Ireland in December of 2019 and returning to South Africa in July of 2021, Hobbs’ practice has undergone a significant revision; where his approach to art making – while remaining within the conceptual realm of aesthetics and war, psychology and the body, art and architecture – was tested by the hard lockdowns experienced in rural Cork.

Reshape is an annual, online survey exhibition that seeks to augment the visibility of contemporary, women-identifying artists in Africa.

Celebrating female artists has become commonplace, yet the reality most women face remains difficult. How are artists dealing with disparity and violence against their gender?