The recent challenge to white hegemony in Hollywood has been a long time coming. It’s not just Hollywood that is blind to its racism. If the film Paddington Bear is anything to go by, racism and nostalgia for imperialism are alive and well in the British film industry. A film like Calendar Girls is […]
The beach has always revealed South Africa in its most naked state. During apartheid, under “Whites Only” signs, it pettily, but overtly, dictated first and second-class citizenry: Where natural beauty and access to calm waters abounded, Blacks were not allowed. In contemporary South Africa, it is used by racists like Penny Sparrow and her […]
“Of course, now that it’s been 25 years since the fall of apartheid, we are all puzzled by the fact that inequality is not only still very high in South Africa, but has been rising and, in some way, income inequality is even higher today than 20 years ago, which is extremely puzzling for […]
The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City by Kim Gurney (Palgrave Macmillan) “Someone once described writing about performance art as ‘trying to catch lightening in a bottle,’” says Kim Gurney, a research associate at the UCT African Centre for Cities and author of the recently published The Art […]
Whether you’re talking million-rand projects, monthly stipends or receipts for transport and airtime, participatory public art practice is loaded with tricky questions about the politics of payment. The top-down relationship between funder, artist and community creates all kinds of power imbalances, which are exacerbated when rubbing up against the issues of access to capital. […]