Perhaps I am not alone in feeling the uncertainty of the times mirrored in my body. Never before have I felt so detached from my physical form, so inattentive to its soft boundaries. The sensation is not unpleasant – much as on a warm, still afternoon, when the air feels continuous with one’s skin, and the distinction between atmosphere and self becomes momentarily unclear. These formless days, having settled in my pores, have dimmed the lines that once so clearly defined the body that is mine.

The photographers’ liminal lives, however, are perhaps not exceptional but commonplace. “Wilful modernity,” art critic Peter Schjendahl suggests, amounts to “finding, or inventing, a home in nomadic rootlessness.” To be an outsider: conspicuous everywhere and everywhere unseen.

That I look to photographs and films in our shared solitude is perhaps unsurprising. Such images, be they still or moving, lend themselves to our newly-confined lives. There are few better ways to commune with photographs than in a book, to sit with them a while, unhurried and undisturbed. As Goldblatt tells Dodd, “a book is tangible and that quality is, to me, very important. The tactility. The sensuousness.” Moving between pages, backwards and forwards, “inwards and outwards,” offers the viewer a more engaged relationship to the images. With Goldblatt and Mofokeng’s books, which are summaries of lifetimes’ work, one moves not only between photographs but through time, from the photographers’ earliest images to their last. As with pictures printed on bound pages, so Gush’s film makes for intimate viewing on the small screen. It is perhaps not its intended form, but being accessible online, one is moved to watch and re-watch it.

“The day after the protests against gender-based violence in Cape Town earlier this year, a group of students returned to sing beneath the statue of Louis Botha. A man with bagpipes was there, playing Scotland the Brave to their outrage. A television crew arrived to film the students as they sang. Someone with an Israeli flag jostled into frame. In the background, municipal workers began removing the signs and flowers left on parliament’s gates. Passers-by paused to catch the scene on cellphones. It was Friday, September 6th. Nene would be buried the following day, and Jesse too. A single police car idled at the curb. The morning was still and warm, and defeat hung heavy in the air.”

Someone suggests the exhibition is a disguised narcissistic gesture. 

Someone proposes the exhibition is not a project of social development but a conceptual sleight-of-hand.

Later: someone asks at what point a patron becomes patronizing.

Five years after The Nose debuted, during the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of Cape Town, the bust of Cecil John Rhodes at the memorial above campus was vandalized. The words THE MASTER’S NOSE BETRAYS HIM were spray-painted on the sculpture’s base, and Rhodes’s nose removed, leaving a flat, unoxidised plane of metal between his eyes. Following the protests, the editor of a monthly art publication took it upon himself to furnish Rhodes with a nose. All in all, three new noses have been glued to the bust; each made from composite material and painted to match the original metal. The last remains precariously attached, while the previous two prostheses are currently housed in a bedside drawer in one of our greener suburbs. The original nose, however, remains at large. It has yet to take up public office.

Here is a red thread. Crimson red, like blood. Placentared, menstrualred, nipple-sucked-raw red. The shade of birth and death, and of life in between – the shade of passion and shame, love and rage. The colour of warning and good fortune; of fire and fertility. A colour analogous with the warm dark cave of the womb. As in the body, so to in the earth – vermillion clay, russet ochre, iron oxide. And above, in the sky, in dawn’s scarlet and dusk’s magenta, at the far end of the colour spectrum, at the rainbow’s apex: red. It is a colour that belongs as much to the exterior world as the interior, to the real as to the symbolic. A colour saturated with meaning, with metaphorical import. Potent and charged with the significance we lend it. And there, the thread, tracing its red line across the canvas.

It is stone to which Aggenbach’s work refers and returns. To Carrara marble, heavy and still and ivory white.To Michelangelo’s Pietà. Her paintings reference this vision of silent piety with a studied evasiveness; echoing the drapes of fabric, the pale flesh, the composition of forms. Only her bronze sculpture speaks; it alone is legible, apparent, a sentence written in the clearest script. It stands apart from Aggenbach’s paintings and their silence, punctuating their quiet.

Younge’s felt compositions are darkly hedonistic, with bare legs and bars, cars and cowboys,pin-up girls and cut-out ones. Unlikely objects coincide in unexpected scenes: a small-town strip mall, a supermarket, a school gymnasium. Nothing is as it seems. The artist’s characters appear as actors in an obscure play, the scenes painted sets on which they perform. There is a sense of unreality about her compositions, not only because the drama they depict is so peculiar, so macabre, but because the perspective is never quite right, the depth never deep.

Art takes as its primary structure translation. Pictorial art represents the visible world, reflects it in paint or clay or gesture. A bowl of fruit described on canvas, a nude rendered in bronze. Even art that makes no reference of the world is a translation of the times, of the attendant art theories, of the historical moment. Perversions, pleasure, politics; the artist’s preoccupations reflect in the work, manifestly, obliquely. Art has always been reproducible; it lends itself to secondary translations. For centuries, aspiring artists copied masters to see how they worked, to understand their logic. Paintings have their engravings, sculptures their plaster copies, all art photography, all language. There is imitation and appropriation, forgery and plagiarism, and the more benign translations of influence and quotation. Why then this emphasis on authenticity, this devotion to the original? Behind every image is another.

Her bed was never left empty, not for eight days and nights. And though she placed clean linen on a nearby chair few people paused to change the sheets. The pillows were always warm, the duvet heavy with sleep. There were twenty-nine sleepers, some friends of the artist, or friends of friends, a brother, several strangers. The artist and an agency babysitter filled in when needed, slept when no other sleepers arrived (five failed to keep their appointments). The artist spoke to the sleepers when they came, sat beside the bed, kept them company until they drifted off. She wrote notes on each visitor and photographed them at intervals.

Alfredo Jaar’s ‘Men Who Cannot Cry’ is an elegant exhibition with few works, coolly conceptual and restrained; an antidote to the summer shows that mark the season. It takes as its central motif the cairn Nelson Mandela and his fellow ex-prisoners made by the roadside when they returned to the prison island five years after their release. To Jaar, the pile of stones is both a spontaneous and ‘extraordinary public monument of reconciliation’ and a metaphor for the precariousness of South Africa’s post-apartheid identity.

Swinney’s work, I believe, is too easily dismissed; too easily passed off as whimsical, a word which has become less description than demerit. A line from Laura Riding Jackson’s ‘The Tiger’, a poem included in the exhibition, echoes familiar criticisms. “So white,” it reads, “so out of time, so story-like.” And perhaps it is all these things, but is also something else besides. For it seems imagination as form has lost favor in contemporary art, now overshadowed by the conceptual, the narrative, and the documentary. Indeed, Swinney’s paintings are an anomaly in a museum known for its blockbuster art, with its high-gloss finishes and large-scale everything.

Intimacy is too often confined with matters of love; yet the word belongs more to trust, to faith. It denotes an act of revelation found in the simple gesture of sharing; bringing that which was previously hidden out from the shadows and into the light. In this exhibition, the artworks chosen explore intimacy in both their content and their form. They touch on universal themes – like birth and love and death – but also on other more singular intimacies; personal histories, dreams and desires. The works reflect on self- intimacy, experienced in solitude, and the intimacy shared between us, be it romantic or platonic, familial or fleeting.

To begin with the objects arranged on the floor: the first a large, uncertain form, shaped from tarp and rope and metal poles, which together lie in a heap, the fabric deflated like a windless sail. The second also shaped from tarp; now rolled up and tightly wrapped with taut lengths of cord. Above these two objects, hung about the walls, are paintings and small, framed drawings in pen and ink. The walls themselves are painted too, with light, off-white washes that trace a series of curved lines. Given how pale they are, how transparent, the lines risk going unnoticed at first; mistaken for shadows, or dark marks left on a sun-bleached wall.

Conceived and produced prior to Robert Mugabe’s displacement from power in November 2017, the works in Halter’s ‘Patience Can Cook A Stone’ are solemn testaments to Zimbabwe’s recent history. A studied seriousness pervades the exhibition; the wall texts an uncertain necessity. Without them, many of the works prove illegible, but with them the same works are limited to a single, reductive reading.

I arrived at Barnard Gallery in pursuit of the inexpressible. “All sorts of things, which cannot be explained or depicted visually, can be found in the exhibition,” curator Mary Corrigall had promised of her group show ‘New Romantics’. Both the press release and an accompanying article Corrigall wrote for Business Day – Artwork as a New Romance Rooted in Nature’s Magic – suggested that the exhibition considered the unknowable, which struck me as only a sly way of saying nothing and also of saying nothing in particular. What was it Wittgenstein had written? The inexpressible is contained, inexpressibly, in the expressed.