Cape Town Art Fair 2023

Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga’s Subduction Studies series proposes an intersection of geology and the imaginary. The title references a geological term describing the sites where the earth’s tectonic plates constantly converge and collide, forcing one plate to sink beneath the other into the earth’s mantle.

The series considers the geological hypothesis Pangaea Ultima, which predicts a re-emergence of all continents into a single supercontinent, with Europe sliding underneath Africa some 200 million years in the future. For each work, Kiwanga selects two geological samples from the collection of the Museum of Natural History in Paris and photographs them.

On one image, a rock from the European side of the Strait of Gibraltar, and on the other, a sample originating in a North African country on theMediterranean shore. By creasing the photographic prints, Kiwanga aligns the two dissimilar rocks–fold line becomes fault line – and effectively enacts the eons-long geologic process of tectonic convergence.

Through this material manipulation, the artist proposes a future collision of the African and European continents, and – given the current reception of migrant communities in Europe – one can read the work as materialising deeply lodged colonial anxieties about the African “Other.”

Misheck Masamvu

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Masamvu’s works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. His layered painted surfaces and brushstrokes, which are almost visceral, exist as remnants of the physical act of painting and give the sense that multiple temporalities have been included in one picture plane. As one of the most significant and pioneering contemporary artists from Zimbabwe, Masamvu’s work offers renewed understandings on visual culture in Africa and the decolonial project more broadly – inciting a fresh critical perspective that bears witness to the political realities, social textures and divergent voices present on the continent. 

Yto Barrada

Yto Barrada’s drawings employ the techniques of paste paper – a centuries old practice used to embellish book covers and end papers with decorative patterns and abstract designs. Dating back to the sixteenth century, paste paper is one of the oldest decorated-paper forms used by bookbinders, a connection that ties to the library as the exhibition space for the work. This traditional technique consists of applying paint in one or more colors to a sheet of paper with a brush or sponge. Directly after the application of the paint, decorative patterns are made using various tools. Deviating from the traditional technique,= Barrada’s works were made using everyday objects, a comb, keys, a twig, fingers. Enrolling the help of friends, children, and collaborators, the artist’s paste papers let go of the traditional precision of the technique in favor of moments of play and spontaneity.

Leonardo Drew

Drew is known for creating wall-based abstract sculptural works that play on a tension between order and chaos. The artist typically uses manipulated organic materials to create richly detailed works – seemingly bursting from the walls – which resemble densely populated cities or urban wastelands and evoke the mutability of the natural world. Materials include wood, cardboard, paint, paper, plastic, rope, string and tree trunks. Exemplary works of Drew’s approach can be found in Number 314. These elongated silhouettes have the monumentality of a skyscraper, as well as the semblance of an ancient tablet. Made in Drew’s signature technique, featuring neatly stacked pieces of cut lumber in a dynamic, gridded sculptural relief, they are finished with a matte black wash with a white spinal column in the centre of each panel, which emphasizes vertical rhythm. The white element amidst the black is like a code or a written language – like Braille, a micro-text to decipher. But it is also like a macro view of a densely built city. Drew says: “I think of it as making chaos legible.”

David Goldblatt

“In the 1990s my anger dissipated. Apartheid was no more. There were things to probe and criticise, but the emphasis was different. Lyricism seemed not only permissible but possible. In the late ‘90s I became aware of colour as a particular quality of this place and its light that I wanted to explore. It seemed ‘thin’, yet intense. To achieve prints that would hold these qualities I would need to print in colour in a way that was similar to that which I had developed for my black and white work … Over the generations, the land has shaped us - I say us in the broadest sense, us South Africans. And we have shaped the land. It is almost impossible now to find a pristine landscape. The grass has been grazed to the point of being threadbare, crops come and go, roads traverse, fences divide, and mines penetrate and throw up scabs of their detritus. These and our structures are the marks of our presence. I am drawn by the intimacies of our association with this land.” David Goldblatt

Nicholas Hlobo

Hlobo is known for creating hybrid objects, intricately weaving ribbon and leather into crisply primed canvas alongside wood and rubber detritus. Each material holds charged associations with cultural, gendered, sexual and national identity, creating a complex visual narrative that references ideas around postapartheid nationhood and bodily healing. Using the metaphor of himself as a surgeon, Hlobo treats the canvas like a physical being, ready to be cut open and sewn up at his discretion. For this latest series, Hlobo embraces acrylic paint as a primary material in his toolbox, continuing to sculpt the canvas with multicoloured stitching but alongside bold streaks of paint. Guided by the subconscious, Hlobo allows the kaleidoscopic gradients of paint to conjure abstract figurative renderings on the canvas. His tactile manipulation of the canvas itself produces protruding structural forms suggestive of topographical models. In between these structures are vibrant, energetic, gestural strokes of paint that contrast with the meticulously woven ribbon.

Exploring and championing a breadth of mediums, such as animation, sculpture, performance and drawing, William Kentridge’s complex creations are multifaceted in form, resonating with audiences through their unifying exploration of the very fabric of our existence. Revisiting and reacting to philosophical, historical or political tropes, he conjures myriad themes in his polymorphic works which are experimental and conceptually rich. Sprout forms part of an accumulation of elemental symbols within Kentridge’s broader practice. This series of bronze sculptures functions as a form of visual dictionary. The sculptures are symbols and ‘glyphs’, a repertoire of everyday objects or suggested words and icons, many of which have been used repeatedly across previous projects. The glyphs can be arranged to construct sculptural sentences and rearranged to deny meaning.

Mikhael Subotzky

Subotzky is a Johannesburg-based artist whose works in multiple mediums (including film installation, video, photography, collage and painting) attempt to engage critically with the instability of images and the politics of representation. His works are the results of his fractured attempts to place himself in relation to the social, historical and political narratives that surround him “At the heart of my work is a fixation with revealing the gap between what is presented (and idealised) and what is hidden, coupled with a desire to pull apart and reassemble the schizophrenia of contemporary existence,” he says.

Clive van den Berg

As an artist, Clive van den Berg has been working across various mediums throughout the course of his prolific career, producing a range of works unified by his enduring focus on five interrelated themes: memory, light, landscape, desire, and the body. Embodied in his lush paintings, mixed-media sculptures, delicate prints, films, and public projects, these themes are bound up with the history of his native South Africa and its ongoing ramifications. For Van den Berg, both the body and the landscape are sites that carry memories and scars and that evoke desires, which he aims to reveal in his work, often through the illuminating power of light. His abstracted canvases of the South African landscape offer an intriguing interpretation into the act and process of painting. In his paintings, Van den Berg presents a new kind of visual language, one that attempts to break syntax without relinquishing its necessity. In this sense, the artist darts between allegory and abstraction in his works, creating these tensions and polarities that simultaneously arrest and excite the viewer when encountering them. In this work Van den Berg is also interested in what is happening underneath our feet, in the unmapped spaces of earth and organic matter, from the multiple, tiny cellular processes of de and recomposition to the larger refiguring of earthly substance.