FILM REVIEW: CUNNINGHAM. HE REFUSED TO be known as ‘avant-garde’, but set fire to every dance cliché and rule that you can think of, in his outstanding and bold repertoire, answerable to no one. This was Merce Cunningham, celebrated in Alla Kovgan’s beautiful film, Cunningham, which features on […]
DANCE REVIEW: PEST CONTROL. YOU DO NOT need to know the dirty politics of the arts in contemporary South Africa in order to access the angry new dance missile which Mamela Nyamza launches at this year’s National Arts Festival. You do not need to know the specifics of […]
FILM REVIEW: MOFFIE HOWEVER MUCH OF the horror and cruelty you may think you will experience in Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie, there will be more. This searingly important testimony to the obscenity of South African apartheid is riddled with the kind of truisms that will make you wish to […]
In a moment, he takes an audience who is laughing and chatting loudly, and renders it speechless, quietly weeping and praying. This is the starting point of Albert Silindokuhle Ibokwe Khoza’s Red Femicycle, which has enjoyed a few platforms in Gauteng this year. An essay on the scourge […]
VISUAL ART HAS primeval, ritualistic roots; amid the moneyed operations of galleries and the cloying notion of commercially accessible easy art, sometimes those old levels of cruelty and wisdom poke through. When you encounter the current body of self-portraits by Steven Cohen, collectively entitled There’s glitter in my soup!, […]
ANIMAL FARM. TWO words which conjure up a quirky engagement with political horror, as they refer to one of the more important tracts of contemporary literature. Peter Mammes, in his current exhibition, It’s Already Too Late Once the Soldiers Have Arrived, touches on the kind of wisdom and […]
THERE’S A POTENT and muscular articulation of joy as you enter the gallery space for the Stevenson Gallery’s celebration of its 15th anniversary. It’s difficult to pinpoint why this happens because contemporary artwork is traditionally not happy but contemplative, not easy but sophisticated and often very self-focused. The […]
SOMETIMES A WORK reaches your sensibilities in an ineffable way, giving voice to your most secret and unuttered notions of the rawness of loss, love and letting go. Sometimes that work can touch all those nerves and succeed in being so supremely beautiful and wistfully unhinged that you […]
THE CLEAVAGE BETWEEN art and sacred ritual is very ancient. And it’s not often that contemporary art reaches richly and bravely beyond the limitations of what our society thinks art is, or should be. It’s, after all, dangerous and unmapped terrain. But Steven Cohen, who has never shied […]
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 […]
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