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.
THE STILL LIFE genre is so well used as a safe teaching device, you may consider it to have a long beard and scant relevance. Truth is, it’s not just a didactic exercise about decent perceptual skills. There’s a whole rich history behind it about contemplations of mortality […]
WAR. IT’S A time of cruelty and violence, of value-shifting upheaval and horrible surprises. War history, by its very nature is clustered with rich and timeless stories of hope and love. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a film based on the eponymous novel, that […]
BEAUFORT WEST. A Western Cape town that like many others in the dusty interior of South Africa, is one that 21st values seem to have left behind. It’s dry in so many ways, and prospects of life for a 24-year-old who is in the ignominious situation of being […]
THEY’RE THERE, CONFRONTING you in the audience before curtain up in a polite and distinctly standoffish way, giving off love/hate hospitality vibes like only the British can do. He with his Bryl-cremed hair and moustache and awkward physicality. She with her guttural monotone guffaw, her frowzy wig and […]
AS YOU REACH the top of Circa Gallery’s oval spiral ramp that has become so iconic on Jan Smuts Avenue in Rosebank, and enter this exhibition of works on canvas by Bambo Sibiya, you realise something overwhelming. This is not a simple art show. It is an event. […]
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 […]
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