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.
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. […]
THE BEAUTIFUL UNLOGIC and earnest hyperbole of a nine-year-old in conversation with his elderly grandfather starts this deeply wrenching play about sudden loss and unspoken words. Retief Scholtz’s work Karel se Oupa, was staged a few years ago, at the Market Theatre; it’s been reworked for radio and […]
AS YOU IMMERSE yourself in the quirky and wise body of work by Andrew Kayser currently on show at Galleri Kalashnikovv, you may experience a frisson of recognition that shifts and transitions as you look at it. But this hasn’t to do with the line work or the […]
PROACTIVE IN THE complex task of making the field of opera possible and attractive as a profession for coloured South Africans, tenor and professor of singing Sidwill Hartman once told the media that his most coveted role was that of the gutsy Pollione in Bellini’s Norma. The tradition-contravening […]
WHAT WOULD YOU do if you discovered that your elderly mum, in her hand-knitted cardigan with her arthritic fingers, has had a secret life that is of great concern to the authorities? A life that involved nuclear plans and spies, sex and political manipulation? You might try to […]
HORROR STORIES OF interfering in-laws, told with earnestness and wit are so well trodden that they’ve become a cliché all of their own and there are a range of memes on the internet which describe them, both with humour and bitterness. Indeed, it’s seldom that a young couple […]
VERY RARELY DO you find a film that is effectively a piece of advocacy work, so searingly well made and intensely carefully constructed that it surpasses the threshold of actuality and turns into great art. Nadine Labaki’s essay in Amharic (with subtitles) on poverty and disenfranchisement in contemporary […]
NOT ONE TO crudely ‘blow his own trumpet’, New Music composer Jürgen Braüninger was a humble, yet vital composer and teacher based in KwaZulu-Natal, set afire by anything from Stockhausen to Zappa and African tonalities. A man with an ongoing wish to forge a new postcolonial South African […]
WHEN A GREAT story is told, it gathers together diverse energies, glues you to its ebbs and flows and allows you to walk away with its resonances ringing and rumbling in your heart and belly. Sometimes all it takes is a 90 minute foray into a rural landscape, […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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