Please find enclosed a correspondence between two friends: a series of fourteen envelopes and responding words.

Inviting Lucienne to co-author her paintings, Anna sent her a sequence of prompts. In reply, Lucienne returned associations, digressions, and oblique reflections. The logic of the proposition extends Anna’s ongoing engagement with games as invitations to chance, generative constraints, and conspiratorial intimacy.

Latin American artists have gained increasing international prominence as the art world awakens to the area’s extraordinary art scenes and histories. In an accessible A-Z format, this volume introduces key artworks by 308 artists who together demonstrate the variety and vitality of artwork being made. Focusing on those born, or who have lived, in the 20 Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions of Latin America, and featuring historic and living artists – both those celebrated internationally and names less-known outside their native countries – this book has been created in close collaboration with an expert panel of 68 advisors and writers.

“Over 100 global artists working with collage, as chosen by a team of art experts – an indispensable who's who of the most exciting and innovative names working in the medium”

Great Women Painters is a groundbreaking book that reveals a richer and more varied telling of the story of painting. Featuring more than 300 artists from around the world, it includes both well-known women painters from history and today's most exciting rising stars.

From the publisher: “This stunningly illustrated survey brings together more than 100 of the most innovative and interesting contemporary artists working across all media and spanning the globe. These are tomorrow’s art superstars as chosen by the future leaders of the art world: the curators, writers, and academics with their fingers on the pulse of contemporary art and culture.”

I have had the ambivalent pleasure of playing witness to my sister’s practice these past few years. I will call her Nico, as she prefers, though as to whether or not Nico is synonymous with my sister, I cannot be sure – her being a body, as she writes, of “colliding personas and intimate intricacies.” My mother (our mother) once asked if Nico had a mother. The question was met with silence, left unanswered. Indeterminacy, you see, is what Nico embodies; being unlocated, insensible to boundaries, alert to the oneness of disparate things.

“The garage – as idea, as device – has proved a continued part of Blom’s practice. A prolific painter, many of his pictures are necessarily consigned to a box under the studio couch, to the storeroom, to a warehouse, that is out the way. Where some are forgotten, others ferment; their charge all the more apparent on finding them again. Still more follow a restless path, going “from table to floor to drying rack, to pile, back to table – collecting layers of marks along the way, before maturing into something worth nailing to the wall.” No longer wooed by impasto paint, Blom works in thinly applied pigment and oil stick, pursuing a novel flatness, which lends his pictures their more moveable form. The paintings, made on unstretched canvas, offer themselves to be rolled up, stacked, left in piles and otherwise neglected. Unlike his earlier works, they submit to rough handling.”

Here, a 55-minute film and a single word. The proposition is simple: a man runs into twisters in search of their still centre, looks for clarity in a dust cloud, for order within disorder. The quiet eye of the storm, however, is a fugitive fact, more apparent as a figure of speech than it is in a whirlwind. But still, the artist pursues its promise, runs time and again into the tornado’s spiraling chaos.

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.