After 18 months of limited in-person social interaction, I have forgotten the art of conversation. Or, worse, it may be that I have lost the desire to have any conversations at all. I choose WhatsApp voice notes over phone calls, and perfunctory Zoom meetings over leisurely coffees. What started out as a Covid-era symptom has lingered; now it’s a habit, a kind of communicative long Covid.
This is rather depressing. What is the point of being the most social creatures in the animal kingdom if we are not going to, you know, chat?
The cure, of course, is to place oneself back in those partly awkward, partly thrilling settings and situations that we all used to seek out (or, more likely, used to have thrust upon us) fairly regularly in the “before times”. Conversations with friends of friends, with professional acquaintances, with strangers to whom we are vaguely connected.
For an arts writer, this means arty gatherings: exhibition openings, launch events and the like. If I put my big boy underpants on and actually meet people and engage in conversation, I never fail to be delighted and invigorated. But one needs an occasion to spur these conversations, and those have been thin on the ground in 2020 and 2021.
It is no small cause for celebration, then, when events such as the Turbine Art Fair (TAF) roll around. After a fully virtual programme in 2020, this year’s TAF is a hybrid of online and in-person spaces. I had the opportunity to walk around earlier this week while exhibitors were setting up; despite my best efforts to avoid conversation, I ended up spending three hours talking to artists, gallerists and curators. It was exhausting. It was exhilarating.
I looked, I listened, I learned. Heck, I even laughed. Who knew that interacting with real live human beings could be such fun? And, as often happens when you discuss things rather than posting about them on social media, a number of my assumptions were overturned.
A brief exchange with TAF founder and MD Glynis Hyslop revealed that, although the National Arts Council (NAC) is a profanity in the mouth of many an SA artist, the state funding body has been a reliable supporter of the TAF.
Later, a dialogue with Karel Nel — who has curated the exhibition Off the Grid as one of the TAF special projects — upended another piece of received wisdom about the SA arts scene. While most of us assume that visual artists have generally been better off than performing artists (and certainly less severely affected by Covid-19 restrictions), Nel offered some insight into the precarious position of many visual artists who do not operate inside the formal gallery system.
The quartet of artists displayed in Off the Grid are all established and recognised, but have nevertheless not been as prominently exhibited as their oeuvres deserve. Derrick Nxumalo’s large-scale creation, Durban City, is an ever-growing panorama of an imagined and vibrantly utopian sea-front; Nxumalo has been building this astonishing cityscape piece by piece for 15 years. Its bright colours pair effectively with Collen Maswanganyi’s painted corkwood carvings, whose playfully satirical figures offer a very different set of scenes from SA life. Christelle Viviers and Joni Brenner, by contrast, present works that depict the personal and the intimate — whether embodied or abstracted — and are less “public” in their orientation.
If the TAF exists primarily as a platform for raising artists’ profiles and bringing them to the attention of a wider audience, there can be no better opportunity than to be the featured artist. This year that honour falls to Xhanti Zwelendaba, who uses various media to disrupt the familiarity of the photographic image.
The result is a bracing iconoclasm. Rugby star Chester Williams is chased by a sjambok-wielding apartheid soldier. The founding fathers of the ANC become pixellated and reformulated into fabric squares (the same happens to a famous Pieter Hugo photograph).
These provocations — along with hundreds of other works installed and hung at the TAF this year — are sure to result in rich, enthusiastic and perhaps productively difficult conversations.
• The Turbine Art Fair is at 10 Fricker Road, Illovo until 3 October, and online at turbineartfair.co.za.
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