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. I am currently a Research Associate at Wits University. This blog promises you new stories every week, be they reviews, profiles, news stories or features.
SAY THE NAME ‘Roger Ballen’ to certain people and you will get a rather judgemental and furious response, even before they know the context or the work being shown. Ballen on Film is a very important exhibition that should disengage all the Ballen nay-sayers, but it may well […]
VERY OCCASIONALLY, SOMETHING comes along which not only ticks every conceivable box in terms of a great production, but it also sets the audience on fire with delicious abandon, and has otherwise demure people dancing in the aisles like demons; people who will drive home with the CD […]
HOW WOULD YOU explain your dodgy life choices to your 10-year-old self? This is one of the motifs that is intelligently threaded through the rich and magnificent text of Cédric Klapisch’s Back to Burgundy, at Ster Kinekor, Cinema Nouveau. But it’s not the element that will grab you […]
THERE’S SOMETHING INTRINSICALLY engaging and satisfying about saturated colours painted with a flat sense of accuracy, but there’s also something deadening about this approach to art-making. The more you look at the paintings in acrylic on canvas by Neill Wright in his show at the Everard Read Gallery, […]
THE FORMAL, POLITE space of the Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg has not lost its sense of prestige. It’s polished and honed in a particular way. There’s certain atmosphere of traditional sacredness in this space. And as a gallery, it’s a complicated sacredness, that is as much about […]
THE AFRICAN NARRATIVE that takes traditional material culture and rethinks it, is not a new one. Think of the work of Man Ray, or the late bronze cast assemblages of Joan Miro, or the tinkering of Picasso in an Africa-wards direction. Some of these forays led the artists […]
LANDSCAPE IS A difficult genre. It’s earned its reputation in colonialist lingo about lands conquered and possessed, but the land is there beneath our feet and remains contested and loved, the site of bloodshed and that of sanctuary. Cape Town-based painter Luan Nel takes on these harsh and […]
AS YOU OPEN the first page of A Several Plot, and step into the whirligig of 16th century European society, with all its costumes and class structure, its hierarchies and ravaging illnesses, so may you be forgiven for feeling as though you’re no longer of the 21st century. […]
IT’S ONE THING to take a beautiful novel and translate it into a film which drives a similar story line. It’s quite another to parade a film under the title of said novel, but twist its ending into something else entirely. Curiously, Ian McEwan who wrote the novel […]
AS THE FIRST trumpet cadence sounds, of the Annie theme song, before the curtains open, the children in the audience hush in anticipation, jiving in their seats as the jazzy showbiz magic of the tune takes over. Directed by Jill Girard and Keith Smith and featuring the astonishing […]
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