Under the Aegis founder and curator Anelisa Mangcu at the Cape Town gallery's booth during the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. Photo: Lwando Mxutu
“You’ll notice this theme of ‘found objects’ in some of the art,” says Michael Jacobs, art concierge and guest liaison of The Silo on Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront, pointing to self-taught Kenyan artist Cyrus Kabiru’s eyewear sculptures. “We’re also standing in a found building—this was once a grain silo.”
Throughout the week of events surrounding the 11th edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, which featured 115 galleries from 24 countries and 400 artists from more than 50 countries, this theme of reinvention or reincarnation would continue to arise. “There is a sense of disruption that is occurring that is encouraging artists to explore artistic frontiers—and the audience seems to be embracing that,” says Anelisa Mangcu, curator and founder of Cape Town’s Under the Aegis gallery, who exhibited in the “anti-booth” Alt section of the fair. “We are fostering intergenerational dialogues and collectively and actively embracing how art evolves over time. [In the South African art scene], more people are breaking free from traditional narratives and embracing diverse perspectives and innovative ideas and the exploration of those ideas.”
The Things that Only Time Will Teach You by Chris Soul on view with Whatiftheworld gallery. Photo: Matt Slater; Courtesy of Chris Soul and WHATIFTHEWORLD
Emerging South African artist Chris Soal, for example, debuted his latest solo exhibition, “Surface Tension,” at Cape Town’s Whatiftheworld gallery. Working with sandpaper, an everyday material that’s designed to be discarded after use, he collected thousands of disks from workshops and factories to create the exhibition’s centerpiece sculpture, “The Things that Only Time Will Teach You,” which nods to the mountain-like mine dumps in his hometown of Johannesburg.
South African visual artist and photographer Lebohang Kganye, meanwhile, inaugurated her first large-scale exhibition in her home country at the Brundyn gallery on Boschendal Estate in the Cape Winelands. The solo show, dubbed “Mmoloki wa Mehopolo: Breaking Bread with a Wanderer,” and accompanying “The Sea is History” explore the topics of heritage, migration, and family archives. Kganye inserts herself into memories and the history of her family members through 3D photo-sculptures scanned from family photo albums designed to appear like a story from a pop-up book.
Installation view of Lebohang Kganye’s “Mmoloki wa Mehopolo: Breaking Bread with a Wanderer,” at the Brundyn gallery on Boschendal Estate in the Cape Winelands. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Brundyn gallery
At the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, Johannesburg painter Ravelle Pillay’s second solo exhibition featured a new series of paintings titled “The weight of a nail.” Delving into her family’s history and relationship to KwaZulu-Natal (the Zulu Kingdom), the artist blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction, the past and the present, through recollections and memories to “peel back layers of history shaped by the ‘civilizing,’ colonial gaze that defines photographic and material archives and shapes collective memory,” she explained in a statement.
Installation view of Goodman Gallery booth at Investec Cape Town Art Fair. Photo: Courtesy of Goodman Gallery
Officially opening Cape Town Art Week, the Zeitz MOCAA Gala 2024 worked with Athi-Patra Ruga on installations inspired by the South African artist’s scenography to bring the event theme of Afrofuturism to life in the contemporary African art museum—the largest collection of its kind on the continent—located underneath The Silo.
“Zeitz MOCAA places immense value on interlocution, providing access to knowledge that transcends traditional educational contexts,” explains Koyo Kouoh, the museum’s executive director and chief curator, who developed an Atelier Residency program to support local artists and a fellowship program for young Pan-African professionals. “To me, it’s really about creating opportunities for those coming after us, especially since in our field, the Gen Zs don’t know how to go about getting these opportunities.”
Aerial view of The Silo Hotel in Cape Town, South Africa. Photo: Mark Williams
At the Cape Town Art Fair, this year’s theme of Unbound placed an emphasis on emerging, diverse voices to allow room for new possibilities, with additions like conversation series “Generations,” which opened up discussion and dialogue between artists at different stages of their careers.
“What stood out for me at this year’s fair was the focus on the environment, especially by the younger artists, who were focusing more on handmade objects and less on technology,” Cape Town-based Talita Swarts, founder and CEO of bespoke art tour and experience company Art Route, told Galerie. “I love the shift of focus on a process of making that is deeply rooted in culture and tradition—the quality was excellent, and the art was just as diverse as our continent, representing multiple identities and cultures.”
