Category: Visual Art

Graphics to appall the gods

Let’s take apart the internet, Matrix style, she says. Let’s reveal it as the crass, manipulative, racist mechanism that it is, she says. It’s a cancer in our midst, premised on shallow values and colonialist mindsets, she argues. Let’s heal ourselves of the rubbish it brings into our […]

My body, my heroism

THERE’S A DENSE stillness articulated in the tough and unselfconscious photographs of performer Oupa Sibeko in his solo exhibition iQhawe. But as you look, you realise there is considerably more to these heroic images, cast pristinely onto a white background, which situate the artist in traditional reeds or nakedly. […]

Love in the time of Palmyra

During the 1980s, Clive van den Berg made a series of unutterably fine lithographs focusing on Pearla Seidle Gibson who used to wave the troops goodbye, as they went to war. It’s called Farewells; the works are small – almost inconspicuous, but for the understated poignancy that powers […]

The stuff of nightmares

AS YOU WALK into the gallery space, an aura of stunned silence enfolds you. There’s a single silver gelatin print by Shirin Neshat from her film Roja hanging on the wall before you: A young woman in black stands in front of a huge, vaguely mushroom-shaped building. And it […]