AiW Guest: Kagiso Nko. It is part of how Joburg narrates itself, in particular to itself. Editors’ Introduction – Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden. AiW note: This review of Anxious Joburg (Wits UP) was completed before our accompanying Review… Read More ›
With AiW Guests: Dolla Sapeta and Madoda Honi. AiW note: A few weeks ago, Africa in Words published the first of our pioneering posts promoting the work of the New Brighton Art School. We sat down with Dolla Sapeta, its founder, to… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Phumelele Mzimela This rare apartheid-era collector’s item Armitage Road (originally released in 1970) is the only record by South African jazz ensemble The Heshoo Beshoo Group. In 2020, the album received a long overdue reissue by the Canadian… Read More ›
With AiW Guests: Dolla Sapeta and Khaya Gqomo. A few weeks ago, Africa in Words published the first of our pioneering posts promoting the work of the New Brighton Art School. We sat down with Dolla Sapeta, its founder, to… Read More ›
AiW note: Last year, Africa in Words published a fascinating Words on the Times feature with the South African artist and poet, Dolla Sapeta. During his responses Dolla spoke of his vision of “bringing to life an art school in… Read More ›
Sepuya’s portrait photography, described by the artist as ‘queer modernism’, disrupts the conventions of traditional studio portraiture, to become a site of homoerotic social relations: a space where the roles of artist and subject are constructed and contested. The book exposes Sepuya’s play with artifice and performance as it outlines the development of his visual practice, cataloguing how he uses his own body, and those of his intimate circle of friends and lovers, in ways which challenge notions of power and authorship. Deeply connected with the written word, he found in texts and literature a way to make sense of this ‘gap of language between desired object and desiring subject’ (p.14), the very gap in which his practice is located.
Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta is perhaps best known for his work as an artist and sculptor. In 2019, he made his literary debut with his first collection of poems, Skeptical Erections, published by Deep South. Reading Skeptical Erections makes it quickly… Read More ›
AiW note: Yesterday, we published South African artist and photographer Terry Kurgan’s Words on the Times, an AiW Q&A set that offers a space for connection during the distancing measures necessitated by the coronavirus. In her responses, Kurgan discusses the copies… Read More ›
In today’s digest, our Reviews team – Wesley, Tom, and Katie – share two each of what’s on – or just on top – of their current bedside reading piles…
A dip in and through our site archives and some Februarys past and present… Because Heroes and Scholars are everywhere (see here for the AiW Q&A of that title, between AiW Guest Aurelie Journo and Abu Amirah, founder of writers’… Read More ›
In the first story in Stanley Gazemba’s collection Dog Meat Samosa (Regal House Publishing, 2019), Mukabwa is a subordinate member of staff, a disgruntled hospital cashier working in the morgue. As the narrator reveals, Mukabwa is nonetheless in a position… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Ofentse Mashego In July 2015, the Johannesburg suburb of Westdene launched its own community mural project. The first of its kind in South Africa, and possibly globally, the Westdene Graffiti Project uses the art of graffiti to personalise… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Bulelwa Mbele Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness is the latest release by the South African photographer and visual activist Zanele Muholi. Previously breaking ground with solo exhibitions including Only Half the Picture (2006, Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town),… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Andrew van der Vlies Terry Kurgan is one of South Africa’s most accomplished and sophisticated theorists of her own photographic practice. Her projects, both studio-based and publicly engaged, have frequently explored the mediations of power relations at play… Read More ›
“It won’t work, it won’t work. This resurrection thing” After fifteen years since the release of his debut collection The Girl Who Then Feared to Sleep & Other Poems, Angifi Dladla is back. The forty poems that comprise Lament for… Read More ›
AiW Guest: Tom Penfold. Now the World Takes These Breaths by Joan Metelerkamp Joan Metelerkamp is one of the most consistent and articulate poets of South Africa’s post-apartheid literary landscape. Alongside other contributors to the New Coin journal that she… Read More ›
AiW Guest Tom Penfold. Imraan Coovadia’s The Institute of Taxi Poetry (Umuzi, 2012) is an appeal to the imagination – the reader’s and South Africa’s. Set through a week in the life of Adam Ravens as he tries to make sense of… Read More ›
AiW Guest Rebecca Jones Is memory imagination or plagiarism? Are artists curators or creators of memory? Is memory determined by audience? Do we remember or embroider? – these were some of the questions we sought to explore in a one-day… Read More ›
PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF DATES: Conference date is Monday 24th June 2013, call for papers closes Friday 10th May 2013. Going Local: African Texts and Cultures. A postgraduate-led conference and workshop at the University of Birmingham, Monday 27th May 2013. Monday… Read More ›
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