Posts by Ashraf Jamal

Contemplative, each bowed in their own peculiar world, their mind’s eye drinking in a green escarpment bedecked by a mountain cocked like a jauntily crumpled hat. The scene is benign. Not all of this is man-made, nature is not always unforgiving, and Burchell should have plucked that mote from his jaundiced eye.

Is there a correct Africa? And who decides which is the more apt? The plague of ideologues of course.

As the poet’s grandmother said, ‘When you take off the school blazer so do you take off the language’, for South Africa’s cultures remained opposed, bi-polar, essential yet in transit.

Nothing feels good right now, nothing is wholesome, equitable, reasonable, or honest. Self-hatred and the hatred of others is omnipresent worldwide.

In a society ground down by conviction, protest, anger, outrage, hurt, misery, frustration, confusion, despair, and worst of all, nihilism, a society unnervingly determined by a death instinct, Botha chooses to give us life.

Who is his teddy bear cocking a finger to? Why are his dwarves, dressed in blue and red short-sleeved t-shirts and white jockey underpants – a favoured dress code – hating and loving each other so? As for the artist dangling from a nail? The piece is called My Gallerist Made Me Do It. Really?

Kate Gottgens is South Africa’s master hunger artist. No one has better conveyed the crack and the hollow that fissures and empties experience.

Letters, hand-written, stamped and posted, are archaic throwbacks to a culture we nostalgically dub ‘slowness’ – slow food, slow beer, slow sex, slowed down hand-made things. The art gallery however has remained largely immune to this threat to slowness.