Hentie van der Merwe’s recent WAM exhibition ‘After De Jongh’ was replete with a selection of second-hand prints of Tinus De Jongh’s work, placed on patchworked fabric. This evokes the broekie lace doilies and crocheted antimacassars of a tradition of ‘tzatzkes’ used to enhance the home of many a granny.
Anwar McKay’s beautiful book ‘The Invisible Boy from Bramble Way’ is about coming out queer in a religious Muslim world coloured by Calvinist values, apartheid relics and bias. It is about learning to call the world – the ‘rich’ parts of the world — home, because you can. Because you’ve earned it.
Ultimately, Rise 76 attempts to tell too many stories but invests in none. The second part should have been fermented, sat in, frustrated, dilemma-rised, dismembered, put back together again and then had the chance for its creative team to be left conflicted as to what in the fruits they had.
Through seducing you into engaging with it, the exhibition places you in dialogue with its artworks. It constantly asks you, “What do you think?” There is an ever-present spirit of collaboration between curator and visitor, inside and outside, space and body, prompting new relationships of meaning to form, again, again.
Terry’s writing is replete with beauty and malice. It’s juicy with sex and sodden with Schadenfreude and self-flagellation. As a novelist, Terry has the temerity to turn his focus on things that you rarely find dealt with as side issues in novels, from late-middle aged carnal joy to colostomy bags.
‘Master Harold’ is about the love and the shame and the hate that gets rolled into one messy stream of anger in the face of caring for a broken parent. And it is about the way in which a primal gesture can so sully a conversation that it annuls it.
Telling your own story with its sensitive veils of family nuance is never easy. The “I” in the tale can be tyrannical and cause more damage than healing. Bo Petersen’s portrayal of apartheid and of her father’s choices is compassionate and complex. You weep with empathy; you stave off judgement.
It is a long play, but such is the storytelling acumen and the passionate focus of Mthombeni, that as she begins, you completely lose yourself in its hairpin interstices. You become a molecule in a story which is at once horrifying and messy, tragic and cruel, yet beautiful and mythical.
Ziaphora Dakile, Kitty Moepang and Barileng Malebye take hold of this script which forces them into the personas of many: old and young, black and white, good and evil, with sophisticated empathy. Vying between English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa, it uses idioms that you understand from your intestines, if not grammatically.
In ‘Bush Brothers’, premised on de Witt’s experiences in the Angolan war, reflected on by war historians as South Africa’s ‘Vietnam’ in terms of the damage it wrought and its purposelessness, you get to understand the horror of violent sudden loss, the impact of friendship and terror of the unknown.
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