Exhibitions

Behind the lens with Teddy Mitchener is still on view at Akka Project in Dubai, United Arab Emirates until February 12, 2019

Photography is simply one of the many mediums Teddy Mitchener uses to express his creativity. A graduate of The Duke Ellington School of the Arts, he credits the institution with broadening the limits of his creativity and instilling in him the love of other art forms such as plaster and stone sculpting, wood work, pencil drawing and painting. The merging of these mediums is what now informs his personal projects and inspires his creative photography concepts. In Disappearing Africa series, Mitchener conceptually represents the cultural erosion that we are witnessing among the so-called millennials and within the public discourse. Body fruit series is a celebration of all the shapes that a woman’s body represents. Women’s bodies are fresh, tangy, bitter, juicy, sweet, sour, hard, soft and unpredictable, and like fruit, they change with the seasons and contain the seeds of life.

Senga Nengudi is still on view at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, United Kingdom until February 17, 2019

Senga Nengudi has been a trailblazer in sculpture for fifty years. A vital figure in the African American avant-garde scenes of Los Angeles and New York in the 1960s and 1970s, her work is characterised by a persistently radical experimentation with material and form. Building upon a legacy of abstraction, Nengudi is a leading figure of Post-minimalism making sculpture embedded with human, philosophical and spiritual concern. Her assimilation of traditional African forms and Japanese Gutai within Western Modernism has also been especially significant. Offering the most expansive overview of Nengudi’s practice to date and shedding light on the work of a figure fundamental to Post-minimalism, this exhibition asserts Nengudi’s vital position within a generation of artists who redefined the possibilities of sculpture and representations of race and gender while drawing upon a tradition of abstraction.

Simphiwe Buthelezi: Lala La is still on view at the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in Johannesburg, South Africa until February 22, 2019

As the recipient of the 2018 Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize, Simphiwe Buthelezi has spent three months in residence at the Bag Factory producing new work for this ambitious exhibition, curated by Chumisa Ndakisa. Lala La means “come, rests here” in Zulu. It is a thread that has run through many of the titles and works in Buthelezi’s previous work and is a theme she has explored intensively during the past three months. Lala La is something a woman would say to a lover, a mother to a child, a child to a mother, or a child to a father. It implies an attempt to offer comfort, reconciliation, and an acceptance of loss; while also exploring love and the idea of love as sacrifice, as something worth dying for. In terms of her feminist vision of an artist, Lala La is also a place Buthelezi has created for herself – a place where she can be free from societal pressures to nurture, fix, and make everything ‘right’.

Festivals

Design Indaba Festival 2019 will take place at the Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town, South Africa from February 27 to March 1, 2019

The annual conference bringing together internationally-acclaimed architects, designers, emerging talents, critics, and art enthusiasts, dedicated towards showing how creativity can make a better world, returns this month. The festival brings with it a crop of international speakers, 20 of which have already been announced, whilst exposing 50 ‘emerging creatives’ from South Africa, helping them to launch their careers and learn from experts in the field. The multi-sensory event takes place in the Artscape Ttheater Center, a hub that for the last four decades has served the Cape’s performing arts, film, tourism, entertainment, conference, and exhibition industries. In keeping with its ethos – a better world through creativity – the upcoming conference promises to inspire design activism through compelling presentations that combine career-changing insights and cutting-edge work.

Art Fairs

Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2019 will open at International Convention Centre in Cape Town, South Africa from February 15-17, 2019

Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF) is the largest art fair on the African continent, showing cutting edge contemporary art. The Fair provides a platform for galleries, collectors, curators and artists from around the globe to engage in cultural and economic exchange. In its seventh edition, ICTAF will elevate the fair’s engagement with some of the most exciting artists from around the world, through the second iteration of SOLO. This section offers insight into artistic practice through curated solo presentations. It will focus on the relationship between the digital and physical space, placing new and traditional media in dialogue. TOMORROWS/TODAY is a cross-section of the emerging and less established artists from Africa and around the world. This section aims to shine a light on emerging and under-represented artists, set to be tomorrow’s leading names.