 | Last Sunday, Sunrise Beach 11h13am. ...read more |
Print Slammed
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011
 | In a rare example of blogging bonhomie Mahala and 10and5 are collaborating to bring Printslam to Oppikoppi this year and we’re calling for contributions. Prinstlam is Oppikoppi’s annual Poster Art Project and this year we’re looking for your original artworks inspired by the concept of Aluta Continua… yes we want you to make visual art that captures the struggle of original South African Music! Think starving artists, busking musos, broke ass bass guitarists couch surfing from groupie digs to groupie ...read more |
Nobody Move!
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 by Bartlett, images Retha Ferguson
 | Grahamstown, Eastern Cape. Frontier Country. Or so the shitty brown tourist road signs tell us – part of some misguided, misspent, local government marketing wankfest that happened a few years back. A needless reminder of the region’s colonial history, when the truth is that the last colonial outpost is still very much alive and well today in the form of Rhodes University. And so to the National Arts Festival, where art and poverty guts it out in the bitter mid-winter ...read more |
No One is Dancing
Monday, July 11th, 2011 by Roger Young, images Sweatface McGee
 | An open and empty white concrete space in a seemingly abandoned and unused edge of the city. We are handed white masks and markers at the door. Performance art abounds. Dancers with big hair climb out of boxes, there are projections, a band set up is behind a wire mesh fence, a drone of music pumps into the hollow space as people with severe haircuts pretend that it’s all cool to be paying forty rand for a double. Silent calculations ...read more |
African Village Graffiti
Monday, July 11th, 2011 by Sydelle Willow Smith
 | I took an economy class trip for one to The Gambia via Senegal, the rest of the Wide Open Walls 2011 crew having arrived a week before. Tom Wolfe’s classic The Bonfire of the Vanities kept me company on the plane as I sat squashed between Americans and their curio shop purchases and crying babies on their way back to Washington. Eventually finding myself in Dakar airport, men with trolleys attempted to grab my bags right off the conveyer belt, ...read more |
Last Sunday
Sunday, July 10th, 2011 by Paris Brummer
 | Last Sunday, Wolves, Joburg, 13h57. ...read more |
Deadly Serious
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011 by Linda Stupart, images Carina Beyer
 | Tretchikoff: The People’s Painter is currently on show at the Iziko South African Gallery. It is the first exhibition of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s original work in a major art institution in South Africa, despite, and perhaps, because of the fact that he is almost definitely the country’s most recognizable and reproduced artist (if you don’t believe me, google his name and “Chinese Girl”). We spoke to the exhibition’s curator, Andrew Lamprecht about who Tretchi was, and why Lamprecht put the show ...read more |
A Boy and his Crayons
Monday, July 4th, 2011
 | As the country shifts its attention to the cold streets of Grahamstown for the National Arts Festival, many will notice that the walls of the old settler town have been carpet bombed by stencil graffiti. Details are as sketchy as the origins of Osama bin Laden’s purported porn stash. However, this much we can say: the graf writer whose stencils have been showing up in the Grahamstown CBD of late – plastered in busy streets for, I suppose, heightened exposure ...read more |
Last Sunday
Sunday, June 19th, 2011 by Damien Schumann
 | Last Sunday, along the N2 just outside of Cape Town, 17h26 ...read more |
A Faraway Border
Wednesday, June 15th, 2011 by Sean O'Toole
 | William T Vollmann doesn’t mince his words. A year after the American author and journalist published Imperial (2009), a 1300-page autopsy of life along the US-Mexico Border, he was asked what readers might gain from reading his ambitious journalistic enquiry. His response: “We can gain an appreciation of the beautifully and horribly arbitrary nature of dilenation.” Ditto Damien Schumann’s Borderline photo essay. ...read more |
