Sean O’Toole

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  August 10, 2020

  “Jo Ractliffe: Drives”

  Curated by Matthew Witkovsky

  South African photographer and videographer Jo Ractliffe, whose peripatetic practice frequently surveys ravaged and etiolated landscapes with a roving camera, refuses easy categorization. This first international survey of her photos and lesser-known work charts her development from wandering modernist observer of Cape Town’s shabby urban periphery in the mid-1980s to experimental documentarian of Johannesburg’s postapartheid flux. The 130 photos, from about a dozen series, register abrupt transitions from black-and-white to garish, flash-filled color, as well as her

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  picks March 06, 2020

  Kevin Beasley

  In the month leading up to his exhibition of new sculpture, works on paper, landscape photographs, and an audio installation, A4 resident artist Kevin Beasley converted the second-floor gallery into a working studio. Over time, the space became cluttered with objects: a complete set of the defunct arts magazine ADA, fishing net buoys, cast-off garments, a brass bell. But for the printed matter, these items form the base of an untitled figural totem (all works 2020) topped off with floral dresses and denim jeans, set in resin and suspended through a service hatch that connects the space’s floors.

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  picks February 05, 2020

  Gabrielle Goliath

  Last September, South African women wearing black and holding placards angrily picketed the parliament in Cape Town after the brutal rape and murder of university student Uyinene Mrwetyana. Two months later, Gabrielle Goliath’s multimedia installation, “This song is for…,” 2019—an immersive, durational, and ultimately recuperative engagement with the country’s grim rape crisis—opened in this venue adjacent to parliament. Goliath’s elegiac installation occupies two empurpled rooms, and builds from earlier collective works exploring brutality against women. Two sets of collaborators lend their

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  previews January 2020

  “I’ve come to take you home”

  Curated by Amogelang Maledu

  In 2015, Rhodes Must Fall, a then discrete movement against a colonial-era statue that stood on the campus of the elite University of Cape Town, seeded a nationwide protest against racism, fees, curricula, and labor practices. UCT’s activist students later burned twenty-four artworks and vandalized a photography exhibition, and a subsequent inquiry by the university found that work by white artists comprised nearly 80 percent of the school’s collection. This survey, the title of which derives from a joyous 2018 drawing by Lady Skollie, features works by twenty-five

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  picks October 04, 2019

  Gareth Nyandoro

  The centerpiece of Zimbabwean artist Gareth Nyandoro’s exhibition, Musika WaBaba VaMike (Mike’s Father’s Market, all works 2019), is an installation comprising a swath of hanging raw canvas with meticulously sliced paper sheets pasted onto its surface. The fabric drapes down to the floor, where the artist has placed a harvest of beans, cabbage, potatoes, and spinach alongside stacks of coal and a confetti-like scattering of offcuts from his scarred paper grounds. Although its title references street patois from Harare, the clearest signifier of Nyandoro’s interest in his hometown’s bustling

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  picks August 21, 2019

  Misheck Masamvu

  Best known for his neo-expressionist paintings of figures incarcerated in color, Misheck Masamvu has recently added text to his armory. In 2016, the twilight of former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s oppressive rule, the artist transcribed his free-verse poem “Still” (“Still in prison,” read a line) onto his Volkswagen campervan and drove it around Harare in a conscious baiting of authority. An example of Masamvu’s self-described “dysfunctional political commentary” introduces his current exhibition of figure drawings and not-quite-abstract paintings. An uncredited text composed from vinyl

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  picks March 17, 2019

  “Still Here Tomorrow to High Five You Today”

  The wall texts for this exhibition of work by nearly two dozen artists engaging with African time, myth, and futurity draw from a durable pantheon of speculative thinkers—among them Ben Okri, Sun Ra, and Octavia Butler—to elaborate thematic displays spread throughout seven rooms. Curator Azu Nwagbogu extracted his title, however, from an eccentric monologue by the Royal Tart Toter, an aging gingerbread man in the animated series Adventure Time. The reference is fitting. Western pop flotsam has been washing up all across the globe for decades, including in pre-independence Senegal.

  Senegalese

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  picks January 16, 2019

  Mia Chaplin

  Mia Chaplin’s energetic impasto paintings describing young women going about their lives are awhirl with dirty pinks, muddied yellows, and shades of green—notably, olive, celadon, and moss. These sullied tones also feature in nine papier-mâché constructions that mimic domestic vessels, as well as in the vertiginous textile installation Waterfall (all works 2018), which is composed of a floral-print fabric that trails into a mass on the floor. Especially in the artist’s five large figurative canvases, this degraded palette, achieved by using dirty solvent, proves strangely compelling, both magical

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  picks October 23, 2018

  Mitchell Gilbert Messina

  Mitchell Gilbert Messina is a post-internet collagist whose practice humorously examines the contradictions and entrenched hegemonies of postcolonial South Africa. The centerpiece of his installation Fluxus Troupe Steal Cruise Liner (all works cited, 2018) is a twelve-minute film about a luxury cruise ship named the Symphonia, which is hijacked by a group of radical Fluxists and rechristened A Comuna Fluxus. The troupe initiates a “participatory social revolution” that sees the ship’s passengers voluntarily check their “power fantasies and social hierarchy” in favor of creating a communal food

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  picks September 14, 2018

  Maja Maljević

  In 2007, seven years after relocating to South Africa at age twenty-seven, Belgrade-born Maja Maljević participated in a print workshop at David Krut Workshop; she has since regularly experimented with techniques that evoke her encrusted style of abstract painting and collaborated with the Johannesburg studio’s printmaker, Jillian Ross. The centerpiece of her exhibition “Polytekton” is a group of sixty-one unique and individually numbered prints, “Documents for the People” (all works 2018). Nested in the democratic title of the print series, which shows off eight different techniques (including

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  previews September 2018

  DAVID GOLDBLATT

  Photographer David Goldblatt was a subtle yet incisive witness to South Africa’s tumultuous system of apartheid. Produced in collaboration with the photographer before his passing in June, this retrospective will present images from two photobooks that defined his liberal-humanist method: On the Mines (1973), an investigation into the extensive capital and labor involved in digging for gold, and In Boksburg (1982), a dispassionate account of “legislated whiteness” in a conservative mining town adjoining Johannesburg. In the late 1990s, Goldblatt began documenting the

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  picks July 16, 2018

  “Pulling at Threads”

  Framed as a meditation on craft in contemporary artistic practice, this exhibition marshals works by eight artists—including Nick Cave, Abdoulaye Konaté, and William Kentridge—to stage an argument about the postdigital “return to the haptic.” Beading, collage, sewing, and weaving feature prominently. Many of the selected works invite what film theorist Laura U. Marks, in her 2002 book Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, described as “a small, caressing gaze.” They include Igshaan Adams’s Oorskot, 2016, a fragile columnar form made from beads, fabric, rope, and wire; and Nick Cave’s