‘Words and Urges’:
William Kentridge’s That Which We Do Not Remember

By Khanya Mashabela | 11 January 2018

Exposed threads of unfamiliarity and destabilised meanings, which unravel interpretations that may have felt straightforward at first glance. William Kentridge’s latest solo exhibition, That Which We Do Not Remember, shares in the concrete/abstract dichotomy that exists throughout his far-reaching practice.

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On Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Havemos de Voltar (We Shall Return)

By Mitchell Messina | 15 November 2017

Sometimes traumatic histories are easier to work through when they’re the subtext to a story about talking animals. And sometimes talking animals provide more nuanced and empathetic entry points than historical accounts do.

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Dolcefarniente: Sweet Doing Nothing

By Matthew Freemantle | 31 October 2017

  I arrived at David Krut Projects’ unlikely suburban bureau in Newlands on a wintry night and, parking between two swaying pine trees in the pitch dark, I half wondered whether I’d made a wrong turn. Crunching my way towards a soft murmur that had all the trademark intonations of artspeak, I was glad to…

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On The New Parthenon

By Khanya Mashabela | 21 August 2017

I walked into a little side room. A woman saw me enter and followed behind with interest. On two tables were two screens. I walked around them and then stopped, standing next to her, watching a Lo-Fi video of a woman throwing plates across a room. A silent minute passed, us strangers standing together attempting to parse the work’s meaning. She turned to me, “Do you understand what’s going on in this exhibition?” suppressing frustration, “I can’t make sense of any of this.”

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Pieter Hugo: Flat Noodle Soup Talk

By Tymon Smith | 25 May 2017

Thus are we drawn into Hugo’s distinctive, contemplative and quietly human series of photos which combine still-life, group shots, portraits and a few nudes to thread a complex journey through the cracks that have been thrown up between China’s history and its rapid embrace of modernity.

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The Parliament of Bodies: Some Thoughts

By Thuli Gamedze | 22 May 2017

I felt that these were the moments to grab, in which the connections- sexual, economic, cultural and political- could be made between current anti-immigration fueled hyper-nationalism, and the history of global colonialism including slavery, and the continued exploitation of the global south. As Kilombo stated, we need not look for new information, but rather opportunities to weave together a widely contextualised understanding of what we have to see as a global crisis.

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Something from Nothing

By Matthew Partridge | 16 May 2017

Immortalised by William Shakespeare’s King Lear, the phrase “nothing will come of nothing” has been on the minds of philosophers for centuries. Its trendy latin equivalent, nihil fit ex nihilo (or just ex nihilo if you’re into the whole brevity thing) speaks of the cosmological debate that goes all the way back to the origins of the universe, and is sometimes used to argue weighty topics like existence and the possibility of a omnipresent being that some like to call God.

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Opening Tonight: The South African Pavilion
57th la Biennale di Venezia

By Adjective Staff | 10 May 2017

The South African Pavilion opens tonight at the 57th La Biennale di Venezia with Candice Breitz and Mohau Modisakeng representing the country in what is arguably the Olympic Games of the Art World. In lieu of a review, adjective brings you a cartoon and a quick cruise through the canals of social media.

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The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)

By Tymon Smith | 07 May 2017

Director Carol Reed will always be remembered for The Third Man but his portentous and slow and very sexless, sanitized version of this particular chapter in the life of an artist who continues to inspire awe and amazement in those bitten with the artistic bug is not his finest moment. Props though to the art department who, not permitted to film the actual Sistine ceiling, recreated it on a sound stage at the Cinecitta studios.

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Non-people people: Elize Vossgatter’s ‘Limp’

By Ashraf Jamal | 21 April 2017

It is whiteness which Vossgatter considers – a whiteness reduced, repackaged, strung together along a conveyor belt. As to where these limbs are destined is unknown – they simply hover, mute, as if frozen in place. The simplicity of this spinal installation is unsettling.

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