Wim botha commune suspension of disbelief theatre
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The Javett Art Centre is not in Joburg but rather in Pretoria, so you might be wondering why I’m blogging about it. I was a guest of Strauss & Co on a recent trip to the Art Centre and from receiving the invite to climbing into the transport provided, I was excited. I had heard so much about the Javett Art Centre but the thought of driving through to Pretoria sort of put a halt on things as I’m not a keen highway driver.
The building, designed by Pieter Mathews of Mathews and Associate Architects, is impressive. The building links the University of Pretoria to the eastern side of the city by a bridge over Lynnwood road. We arrived on the UP side of the centre (as seen in the cover photograph).
The Art Centre houses four exhibitions at the moment:
- 101 – Collecting Conversations – a collection of 101 signature works of South African artists selected from collections around the country.
- All in a Day’s Eye – The politics of Inno
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The Norval Foundation has announced their 2018-2019 Exhibition Programme. This Steenberg-based venue in Cape Town exhibits 20th and 21st century visual art from South Africa and beyond.
It houses a gallery, sculpture garden, an outdoor amphitheatre and a research library, plus the Skotnes Restaurant and dryckesställe, a bespoke shop and children’s playground. Diarise these exhibitions.
Helen Sebidi: 8 September 2018 – 24 January 2019
Featuring drawings and paintings from a career spanning five decades, this exhibition will look at Helen Sebidi’s (born South Africa, 1943) continued dedication to issues of non-western mythologies, ancestry and traditional African value systems. Through the relationship between dreams and ancestry, Sebidi references the politicisation of landscape, and its relationship to growth and issues of creation. Curated bygd Portia Malatjie.
Prism – Wim Botha: 29 September 2018 – 28 January 2019
Wim Botha (born South Africa, 1974) has de
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Troyeville – how do I explain this ‘melting pot of everything’ suburb which has been home to so many of our exceptionally creative talents, filled with history of the early beginnings of Jozi and which has more churches than any other suburb located in it (I still need to find out the reason for this)? I find Troyeville interesting, stimulating, inspiring, gritty, down-to-earth and very real.
The place that has me coming back to Troyeville time and time again has to be Spaza ArtGallery, a semi-detached house in Wilhelmina Street owned by Andrew Lindsay who himself is a well know creative in the city, with a tower in the garden called the *I’Themba tower. It’s HAPPY BIRTHDAY month for Spaza Art Gallery and as very little is known about the beginnings of Spaza Art Gallery I posed a few questions to Andrew, affectionately know as Drew, to get the full story on its eighteen years.
How did you land up in Troyeville?
It was by default real