A freelance arts writer since 1998, I fell in love with the theatre as a toddler, proved rubbish as a ballerina: my starring role was as Mrs Pussy in Noddy as a seven-year-old, and earned my stripes as an academic in Fine Arts and Art History, in subsequent years. I write for a range of online and print publications, including the Sunday Times, the Mail & Guardian and artslink.co.za and was formerly the arts editor of the SA Jewish Report, a weekly newspaper with which I was associated for 16 years. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.
NOT EVERY VISUAL artist would be willing to admit the disheartening sense of dead ends and near misses that comes of muddling through ideas, before they get to submit an ‘offering’ to the world. It’s an admission of humanity and frailty in a world fraught with quick fixes, […]
WHEN A CAST of performers is able to wrench an experienced audience member from guffaws of unrestrainable mirth to real tears of sadness with the flick of a wrist – as life itself can do – you know you are in safe hands. Based on the biblical tale […]
YOU’VE GOT TO hand it to Harry Sideropoulos. As he pounces onto the stage, you fall completely in love with his gusto and energy, his gentle booming whisper and the fluid repartee that is Seriously?!, a show created by him in collaboration with Strato Copteros and Gina Shmukler […]
THERE IS ALWAYS something completely seductive about the appearance of a queue of people. One after the other, each with their idiosyncrasies: it’s an understanding of humanity that honours their uniqueness but empathises with their common plight. And the logic and structure of a line of people is […]
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN a gorgeous stranger pops into your restaurant for a casual burger and a stated desire for more? Is he a critic? Has he an agenda? When Louis (André Weiderman) presents himself at the restaurant owned by Lilian (Roeline Daneel), you think love is in the […]
CHILDREN ARE FASCINATING entities on stage or screen. Rogue in their sense of instinct, they can be either fundamentally defining for a work, or they can simply reduce it to a morass of precocity, doing damage to the artistic product and probably to their own self-esteem, by blowing […]
EVIL AND TERRIBLE leaders shape our world. It takes someone with a certain level of passionate belief in who he is and what he stands for, to commit the ultimate act of premeditated murder of such a leader. It doesn’t happen often, but it happened during the first […]
DON’T BE PUT off by the title of the new Diane Keaton film, Poms, and the bubble gum shallow American yarn it implies. Yes, all that glittery bubble gum stuff is there, enfolded in the story’s mix, but that’s probably not the main reason why you will love […]
HE’S EARNED HIS reputation – and several awards – as a fine art photographer, but Mikhael Subotzky has been smashing definitions throughout the trajectory of his career. This very large solo exhibition, entitled Massive Nerve Corpus at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg sees his thinking pointed in several […]
The name ‘Pablo Picasso’ has become idiomatic for so much: from superficial reflections on talent to car brands. But its associations have also become so completely flattened into a very narrow understanding of what this artist was all about, and why his work was important to the world. […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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