Category: Visual Art

Seduced by a tulip with crimson streaks

IT’S MID 17TH century Amsterdam and the money making pastime of predicting the rarity of a tulip from its bulb is all the rage. Picture the hustle and bustle and noise of a 20th century stock exchange, or a nineteenth century auction, toss in a bit of Victorian […]

Levelled by floodlines

IT’S THE SILENCE that grabs you first. And the gaze of the sitters. And then you notice the truncated quality. Everyone is submerged in cold, dark water. But it is the silence that holds your heart in thrall, as you walk through this astonishing selection of photographs from […]

Kaddish for Elu

SOMETIMES THE RAW howl of loss is the only thing possible. Sometimes it is more potent than any words which are in danger of teetering anywhere near the threat of idle platitude. Sometimes the raw gesture, the unthinkable act of personal anger and sadness in the wake of […]

Where’ve all the photo budgets gone?

HERE’S THE SCENARIO. There’s a festival of theatre happening in a city. Many productions to see. Some new, some tested. There’s nothing quite like a platform for new theatre ideas to flex their proverbial wings and try out their thinking on a new audience. There’s also nothing quite […]

Ode to the hole in your heart

THE IRREVOCABLE EMPTINESS of loss is the subject of the video piece and related artists’ books that comprise this intimate and raw, broken yet focused work of Minnette Vári. It’s a lot less abstract than her previous bodies of work and while it is unashamedly personal for Vári, […]

Quarried wisdom in a vestibule of bling

IT BEGINS WITH the stairs. Brutally bling-filled, impenetrably shiny and black, the introductory aspect of the Keyes Art Mile in Rosebank, the project of several wealthy consortia, which contains the Whatiftheworld gallery is not what you could describe as friendly. It’s pristine and shiny, slippery and steep and […]

Our messy world in a clean bromide

THE SEVENTEEN PRISTINE photographic images by Michael Meyersfeld that comprise his current exhibition, Adaptation would have given French theorist Roland Barthes a run for his money in how they extrapolate on the rhetoric of the world in which we live today. Barthes wrote with a scalpel-like language through […]