THE GENTRIFICATION OF urban neighbourhoods – even in cities such as Johannesburg or Cape Town – was once seen as a panacea to all society’s ills; today it has turned into a proverbial four letter word. This is because of its moral promises and literal hypocrisies, in the […]
THE ADJECTIVE USED to describe a persecuted community is dynamite. It can represent the psychological difference between your being able to recognise those someones in the community as people just like you, or “others” that are not like you at all, and therefore have nothing to do with […]
THE HORROR OF being a small child beset with enormous flaws is something that many a writer may attempt to portray because of the challenge of capturing its profound complexity that scoops up the contradictions of being human and holds it tight. Not every writer can succeed. Nor […]
THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN politics and love in life is fairly well-trodden filmic ground, ripe as it is for some of the most beautiful romances imaginable. It’s a ground fertile with issues of young love, utter devastation, twisted values and magnificent music. Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War touches all of […]
IT TAKES A special kind of boldness and confidence to fill a traditional gallery space in a way that pushes its capacity and radically shifts its limits. This was something you may have seen in Igshaan Adams’s exhibition last September, as it is something you will experience with […]
WHAT ARE THE basic parameters that inform a festival of contemporary dance? Should there be a gatekeeper who assesses wannabe shows on the gig and plays god, in his or her ability to give a hopeful group of applicants the ‘yay’ or ‘nay’? And who is that gatekeeper? […]
YOU MAY FIND it difficult to believe that the glossy corporateness of the Standard Bank Gallery in central Johannesburg could be challenged to its very core. There are only a few days left in the Johannesburg season of the exhibition of Igshaan Adams, the 2017 Standard Bank Young […]
SEXUALITY, SONG AND the fear of losing what matters comes under the loupe in Choir Boy, a hard-hitting, yet simple play which is sensitively and relevantly translocated from an American context to a local one. Comprising a cast of four young men who articulate the groups and cliques, […]
“DEAR MOM. ONE day, I’ll make you proud. I promise.” A small dedication on the wall behind Sowetan teenager Zinhle Sithole sums it all up. She’s the subject of one of Jodi Bieber’s beautiful series of portraits that takes the whole model of an exhibition to a new […]
THERE IS AN unequivocal boldness to the premise suggested by Rungano Nyoni’s film I am not a Witch, which was chosen to open this year’s European film festival on the art film circuit. By dint of its title, it ticks a number of boxes which are geared to […]
Recent Comments