Making sense of what landscape is about: a conversation with Mduduzi Xakaza

by Mario Pissarra

Mduduzi Xakaza (1965–) paints landscapes that draw on his lived experience in rural KwaZulu-Natal. Localised histories and concerns are brought into conversation with broader philosophical questions regarding relations between humans and the natural environment, and the role of aesthetics in creating a dialogue or exchange between artist and spectator. Deliberately eschewing grand narratives, Xakaza’s paintings quietly elicit contemplation of contemporary debates about land ownership and usage, and the extent to which western aesthetic tropes can be repurposed to articulate contemporary African perspectives. [1]

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Paul Sibisi and the art of protest

by Brenton Maart

I

Paul Sibisi was born in 1948 and thus, in his first year of life, came into a family and community at the very cusp of insanity, pivoting violently between a colonial history and an institutionalized apartheid reality, legislated and enforced. Reactions reverberated across the country like dynamite dominoes, and thus the artist’s birth year was proximal, personal, direct, immediate; one experiential component of a country under attack.

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