Original Story Published by: By Editor, www.africa.com
Photo Source: Courtesy of Africa.com
The years have been good to the art fair, which celebrated its tenth anniversary this past weekend and staged its most inspired show to date.
The 10th edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF) took place last weekend on the southernmost tip of the continent where the black gold of the sun sets late and the ‘notion of time’ becomes an apt theme for Africa’s largest gathering of contemporary art. With over 106 exhibitors from across Africa and the diaspora, coming together for several panels and a number of exhibition openings across museums and galleries in Cape Town, the art fair made a generous space for an influx of devotees to reflect on disparate ideas of time itself.
Such was the collision of time and space for a Norwegian art fan, one of the 25,000 attendees, who, on the Friday of the art fair, found herself in the booth of South African artist Zandile Tshabalala’s solo show Umcimbi, standing on an earth-colored vinyl floor paper reminiscent of a childhood home in Soweto. The cake was frosted red, and shaped in the figure of 21, as an ode to the artist’s mother’s birthday — commemorating the universal” celebration of transition into adulthood. Tshabalala used this as a departure point to refigure ideas of gathering as a community in celebration of a Black femme’s growth and agency.
A fine-art painter with an affinity for prioritizing the rest and revelry of Black women, Tshabalala’s work, in conjunction with BKhz, was a portal into a contrast of colors that translated to a lush and insistent celebration of the self and one’s community. In the artist’s own words, her practice is an urgent and incessant response to the zeitgeist because, “that’s what we need, especially in painting history. We need a depiction of Black women in different angles, and not just this one story as it has been told throughout painting history.”
The mood reigned nostalgic in Tshabalala’s booth, where portraits of individual Black women were in conversation with scenes of family lunch being prepared in large pots. The most conspicuous paintings were those which placed the viewer in the position of a photographer gazing into intimate and celebratory family moments in the midst of a party, inviting attendees at ICTAF to recall their own birthday memories. What Tshabalala captured is the bold essence of cyclical body-time imprinted in sepia-tone film recollections and layers of paint, insisting that we “come party because hard times require furious dancing.”
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