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, Kentridge conjures myriad themes in his polymorphic works which are experimental and conceptually rich.

Kentridge proposes a way of seeing art and life as a continuous process of change rather than as a controlled world of certainties. He constantly questions the impact of artistic practice in today’s world and has investigated how identities are shaped through shifting ideas of history, and place, looking at how we construct our histories and what we do with them.

Kentridge’s botanical drawings of trees are rendered in Indian ink on the pages of old encyclopedias, and attempt to capture the forms of trees indigenous to the area around Johannesburg. Using photographic references and drawing loosely in Indian ink, the plants are grown page by page – each page holding only a fragment of the whole. The complete botanical forms emerge more by recognition than by a pre-existing clarity as to what the plant must look like, as the pages are shifted, layered, torn, pieces added, marks added – until the tree reveals itself as complete.

Drawing from Waiting for the Sibyl (Comrade Tree, I report to you) is the latest addition to Kentridge’s series of large-scale ink drawings of trees and phrases on found paper. These drawings go hand in hand with his new opera project, Waiting for the Sibyl, which premiered at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma in September 2019. Waiting for the Sibyl was created in response to Alexander Calder’s Work in Progress – the only operatic work created by Calder and staged at the Opera in Rome in 1968.

“I thought that the paper, the fragments of paper with which I have always expressed myself , were the right elements to start the dialogue with Calder”. In Kentridge's mind, the floating papers immediately evoked the image of the Cumaean Sibyl, the priestess who wrote her prophecies on oak leaves. The floating papers, like loose leaves, with the prophecies written on them, are blown away by the wind.

In her trilogy of films, 'Illusions Vol.I, Narcissus and Echo', 'Ilusions Vol. II', 'Oedipus and Illusions Vol. III, Antigone,' Grada Kilomba uses Greek myths to explore systems of oppression and power as they relate to (post) colonialism. What if history has not been told properly? What if only some of its characters have been revealed as part of the narrative? And what if our history is haunted by cyclical violence precisely because it has not been buried properly? Kilomba asks.

“I wanted to capture the women characters [in these performances] negotiating this complex history of cyclical violence and oppression… they embody the heroines, the birds and the monsters. The sculptural moments reveal the intensity of this negotiation,” says Kilomba.

This photograph is taken from the second film in the trilogy, Illusions Vol.II, Oedipus and depicts the moment that, in the Greek myth of Oedipus, the protagonist encounters the Sphinx. The Sphinx was placed by the gods at the gates of the city, because something very terrible had happened in the past. She would pose a riddle to anyone who would enter or leave the city, and would devour everyone who could not give the correct answer to her question - after all, one cannot escape from its own history.

Misheck Masamvu uses painting and drawing as a way in which to investigate human existence and our relationship to the natural world. Central to his practice is abstraction, which the artist employs to explore “the language and politics of space”. While abstraction forms an integral part of Masamvu’s practice he does not let go of figuration completely. Rather, his figures appear within the abstracted space he creates, attesting to his continued belief in the narrative potential of painting. For the artist, his paintings are understood as marks of existence, pointing not only to the realities of his lived experience but also to mental and psychological space, where each layer of paint, or brushstroke on the canvas proposes a search to resolve conflicted experiences or decisions.

"I use both figuration and abstraction in my work because I am looking for a new alternative space – one that is against the forced ideology of government and the breakdown of the pursuit of humanity. For this, the symbolism of the landscape and the figure in constant states of entangled metamorphosis are important. I am aware of the communion of the body, the soil and spirit and am interested in how transfiguration and memoirs of body and soul can evoke a real sense of vulnerability", says Masamvu.

With a technique that is immediate and direct, Masamvu's works consist of layered painted surfaces, abstracted forms and brushstrokes which are almost visceral and exist as remnants of the physical action of painting. In establishing a distinct abstract visual language, one gets the sense that multiple temporalities have been included in one picture plane and that beneath the surface of one painted image, an infinity of others exist. The outcome of which is a porous pictorial space, one that moves between representational clarity and rich, abstract abundance.

Shirin Neshat’s photographic series ‘Women of Allah’ examine the complexities of women’s identities, both through their personal and public lives. The series also explores notions of femininity in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy in her home country of Iran. This is done both through the lens of Western representations of Muslim women and through the more intimate subject of personal and religious conviction. This particular image was one of only a few taken by Neshat in Iran during one of her last trips. She was inspired by photographs from the Qajar period, which tended to have similar backdrops.

“All of my work is about framing and context. Where you stand affects what you see. Your notion of reality is completely shaped by your perspective and what you bring to what you’re looking at. 

I’ve always loved modern art, especially Minimalism and Conceptual art. However, I’ve often struggled with interpreting its meaning and even interpreting its value, and at some point I thought that I could engage with it more closely by working with optical ideas that artists such as Frank Stella, Daniel Buren, and Ellsworth Kelly were wrestling with. I was really interested in Buren’s stripes because they are seen as so mundane and apolitical, and I realized that in the United States stripes play a critical role in our iconography as a country (the stars and stripes) but, of course, that we also imprison more people in the land of the free than anywhere else in the world and that prison stripes also have a meaning, a potency. There’s the idea of bars that are meant to represent liberty but are also meant to represent people being confined.

I thought by using stripes, for instance in Every Act Is Political… (Buren)—and they’re the signature medium in Buren’s work—that I could add something into that meaning, so I started to use old prison quilts that have stripes in them. And I thought by remaking popular works by canonized artists I could possibly complicate the conversation about what I believe, which is that all art is political. Finding Buren's quote that every act is political after I made the work really solidified my idea that it doesn’t have to look political to be political, and maybe if it doesn’t look political we need to reshape our notion of what the political is.” - Hank Willis Thomas 

David Goldblatt chronicled the structures, people and landscapes of his country from 1948 – through the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, the apartheid regime and into the democratic era – until his death in June 2018. Goldblatt’s photography examines how South Africans have expressed their values through the structures, physical and ideological, that they have built. In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2001, a retrospective of his work, David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years began a tour of major international galleries and museums. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at both Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. He has held solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum and the New Museum, both in New York.

“In a self-reflexive gesture, a pair of images from 1955 documents an itinerant photographer and his client. Visible in the images are an old-fashioned camera and tripod with cloth cover, and a man in a baggy suit who laughs and sways charismatically, as though dancing to music before the lens.” - Rachel Kent, chief curator MCA

Hank Willis Thomas has often explored similar ideas by incorporating a wide range of historical sources that he transforms in order to create an experimental approach to image making that reflects his broader investigation of the historical and cultural apparatuses surrounding issues of race, gender, and identity today.

In his retroreflectives series, Thomas frequently utilises photographs that document civil rights struggles as the foundation of his work – transforming the raw material of past social struggles, from the civil rights movement to anti-apartheid demonstrations, into his own primary sources for current cultural conflicts. As he explains, "I’m fascinated with how our history and our understanding of the world actually shifts, so I think of history as a moving target". In so doing, he not only helps reframe the past as ever relevant, but also offers moments of contemporary agency and resistance.

“prou(k)n is a false acronym for: Project For the Affirmation of the (K)new - a series of drawings echoing El LIssitzky’s Proun series of paintings. 

The prou(k)n series is an effort to find a sketched language that registers the tension between the new, as a move toward the unknown, and the knew, as a move toward recovery of what was lost. In our ongoing project of post-colonial transformation and anti-colonial liberation we are looking for both the return of what we know was taken (dignity, memory, possibility) and simultaneously to transcend the boundaries of all that we know and all that is knowable. This is the double agency of decoloniality. 

The prou(k)n series builds a soft language of ganglia and quantum entanglements for thinking with our collective nervous body. These drawings form a gestural vocabulary for an other-worldly protest drawn over analytic diagrams of the post-colonial condition. prou(k)n drawings are knotted signals in the noise of a collective dream (sometimes nightmare) of another world.” - Nolan Oswald Dennis

"Johannesburg - Joburg - is not an easy city to love. From its beginnings as a mining camp in 1886, whites did not want brown and black people living among or near them and over the years pushed them further and further from the city and its white suburbs. Eventually, under Apartheid, particular areas were prescriptively defined by race : laws required that only a certain race - black, white, colored, Asian - could occupy a given piece of land. Soweto and Alexandra were for blacks, Hillbrow, Houghton. Pageview for whites. Lenasia for Asians, Protea for coloureds and so on. Changes were brutally made and people mercilessly moved, invariably to suit white wishes. With the abolition of Apartheid in the early 1990s, the racial laws have gone. People are now free to live and work where they choose and the sharpness of the racial divides is softening in many areas. A huge influx of people from all over Africa has changed the demographics. But essentially we have a city of fragments widely scattered over one of the largest municipal areas in the world. It is difficult to imagine Joburg as a coherent whole.” - David Goldblatt