Johannesburg: Portrait with blood

BEING ALIVE ON this African continent is a very complicated thing, particularly if the home in which you were raised has become lethally hostile to you. Investment analyst by day, fictional writer by night, Bulawayo born Sue Nyathi, who burst onto readerships’ awareness in 2012 with her debut […]

Two men in a sauna

PROFOUND GRIEF IS a curious cipher of very real emotions which reach much deeper than maybe you’d like. It’s a tongue loosener, a memory jolter, a redefiner. In Easter Island, a beautifully crafted English-language radio play by Anton Krueger, you get to meet a father and a son […]

What lies beneath

AS YOU ENTER this intimate little space, your heart and eyes are grabbed by a lion lying ponderously before you. It’s the central focus of a large scale painting called Cave Painting and as you move closer to the work so do other things in this piece begin […]

A burnished menagerie

IS IT CARVED wood? Or is it burnished clay? Maybe it is made of flesh and blood? Nothing is completely obvious in this biblically loaded exhibition of beasties which you know and others from the annuls of sculptor Michael Teffo’s sense of whimsy. Either way, you will want […]

Pressure Cooker Blues

WHAT DO YOU do when bad news seems to come in a rolling tsunami? From disappointments at work to unexpected secrets from your children, a wife with an addiction issue and a mother-in-law with a leaking toilet and a mouth that doesn’t let up on the overriding commentary […]

Incendiary youth: SA style

A WHITE HIGH school girl lies on her belly on a school bench to read a spot of King Lear as she munches on an apple.  There’s a sense of ‘how things should be’ in everything from her school uniform to her engagement with what is obviously homework. […]

Dog star, celebrated

TANTALLON PEGASUS IS the quirky name of what appears to be a pointer. He’s big, he’s bony, he’s got a patent and well-developed sense of humour and he’s entirely vulnerable. Lying this way and that, asleep, with his ears back, his legs spread or curled up in a […]