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.
EVERYONE KNEW HER face. Everyone. When SABC anchor Tracy Going was brutally beaten by her boyfriend, it was knowledge instantly in the public domain. This was a story that rocked South Africa, not only for its grotesquely sensationalist value, but it opened up a whole hornet’s nest of […]
SOMETIMES IT TAKES a fresh young voice to rejuvenate an old chestnut in ways you couldn’t have imagined. Anna Greenfield’s Afrikaans language radio drama Liewe Pynappel debuted this evening on Radio Sonder Grense. It’s a gentle tale of pregnancy and love, in that order, with a little feisty […]
A NAME SYNONYMOUS with music radio, David Blood was legendary in so many ways. He had a dulcet voice, an impeccable understanding of the political currents that conflated with culture, and an ability to shapeshift and re-invent himself as the industry changed in values and priorities. He also […]
WHAT WOULD YOU deem the most difficult job in the arts industry? Could it be running a busy top-flight gallery with the difficult egos that come of sensitive artists? Could it be being head honcho to an arts fund-raising initiative, where you have to make decisions and by […]
BORN TO FRENCH-SPEAKING parents, but committedly South African, theatre director, stage actor, film and tv personality, Sylvaine Strike is, according to the French Ambassador, His Excellency Christophe Farnaud, and the power invested in him, a bridge between the two cultures. He said this at a deeply moving, intimate […]
WHAT DO YOU do when the love of your life is swept away by a big old auntie with a fortune, a hazy tale of connection to her and all sorts of plans to marry her to someone else? Why, you ambush the property with no less than […]
FROM THE MOMENT you enter the space, you’re implicitly aware that the man whose work you are looking at is an utter maverick, one who is unafraid of cocking a snoot at everything from national earnestness to the discipline of art films. But that is not all: Samson […]
The business of being neither here nor there comes under the painterly and philosophical focus of Diana Page in her first exhibition in South Africa in several years. It’s the flipside of being out of South Africa and living in Turkey for over a decade, and there are […]
FRANCE IN THE 18th century, boasted, among other things, a Rococo thinking that cast a light-hearted hue at almost everything. The artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze was one of the painters of the era, popular for his saccharine images that teetered on the sexually taboo, with young girls mourning small […]
DON’T BE PUT off by Craig Smith’s characteristic light touch on his raw canvases in It’s Irrelevant, a solo exhibition of new works mounted at Galleri Kalashnikovv in Braamfontein. Similar to the thinking of American artist Cy Twombly, Smith negotiates space, gesture and chance in a way that […]
Geoff Sifrin
Robyn Sassen
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