A wave of new art books has hit the shelves. From self-published memoirs to early career monographs and sweeping continental surveys, South African art is well-represented in book form.

The Distance Within — Nicola Brandt (Steidl, 2025)

Nicola Brandt is a Namibian artist of German and South African descent whose work investigates the history and legacy of German occupation in Namibia. The Distance Within features photographs and video stills made over more than a decade, aiming to deconstruct, as Brandt puts it, “certain established ways of seeing Namibia.”

It’s a gorgeous book — clothbound hardcover with just under 400 pages, almost half of which feature Brandt’s striking images — that’s been edited with great care by Alexandra Dodd. Essays by writers including Sean O’ Toole and Zoë Samudzi feature at the end, as does an interview with the artist by Sven Christian.

Brandt also contributes an introductory essay to the book, which, although formal and impersonal despite the book’s intimate title, does a good job at outlining the artist’s interests and intentions. Here, Brandt takes us through Namibia by way of its landscapes and structures, as well as its people. A group of roaming donkeys, a cluster of unmarked roadside graves, ordinary citizens at work, and endless landscapes with scrubby bushveld, winding roads, and uninterrupted coastal scenes are some of the things Brandt focuses her lens on. There is also archival and research material aplenty, a reminder that German colonialism, National Socialism and apartheid are not mutually exclusive, and that indigenous narratives hold the key to a fuller understanding of Namibian history.

Importantly, Brandt’s images are allowed to exist independently — you need not read the various essays to make sense of the artist’s intentions — though they are brilliantly accompanied. The book’s texts are well-placed. Dotted throughout each section are well-chosen pull-quotes, lifted from the commissioned essays, which all sit towards the end of the book. As far as the essays go, some are narrative-driven and prose-based, transporting you to the sites and contexts with which Brandt is preoccupied. Others are dry and factual — dates, death tallies, and timelines. But both styles of essay are necessary if we are to gain a full understanding of the story of Namibia, however, which is certainly the case in this monumental and significant new book.

Available from Steidl

Infirmary, Erf 81 (Cape of Good Hope) — Jane Alexander (Stevenson, 2024)

What a joy it is that we still have galleries and artists committed to documenting and celebrating their work outside of commercial exhibition catalogues. Jane Alexander’s Infirmary, Erf 81 (Cape of Good Hope) is a remarkable title that was quietly published in 2024.

Made possible with funds by the Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust’s ‘Extraordinary Award for Sculpture in South Africa’, the book looks at Alexander’s site-specific installation of the same name. Infirmary was first installed in 2020, in a former military storage unit at Erf 81 in Tamboerskloof, Cape Town, for one week. With a comprehensive, contextual introduction by Alexander, the book contains essays by Simon Njami, Premesh Lalu, Svea Josephy, Fabian Saptouw, and John Nankin, all of whom were invited by Alexander to respond to her work, but not specifically to the title installation (save for Njami). As a result, the texts have a varied focus, and paging through Infirmary, Erf 81 (Cape of Good Hope) offers a sweeping view of Alexander’s work over the years. The essays are engaging, and provide great contemporary framing for the artist’s decades-long practice. Josephy’s text, for example. Zeroes in on Alexander’s Butcher Boys sculpture, arguably her best-known work, and looks at what makes an “iconic” work of art.

John Nankin’s essay is perhaps the most intriguing. It follows the socio-political and material history of the building, from its original purpose as an Ammunition Magazine, through to its life as a guerilla gardening site, a haven for youth and animals, a mixed-use art hub, and the site of Alexander’s installation. Nankin himself has a long history with the site, having rented studio space there for 20 years. His essay, equal parts factual and anecdotal, reveals a site that is rich in stories, and makes Alexander’s choice to work there all the more interesting.

Available from Stevenson.

To Sharpen Our Senses and Soften Our Touch — Chris Soal (Skira, 2025)

Since graduating from the University of Witwatersrand nearly a decade ago, Johannesburg-born, Cape Town-based artist Chris Soal has been steadily carving out a global career for himself. This early career monograph, then, is right on time.

Published by Skira, the book’s cover features one of Soal’s signature toothpick works — whirling, resplendent sculptures that look like topographies and creatures all at once. Featuring the evolution of these toothpick works as well as his early bottle-cap works, concrete and rebar sculptures, and his lesser-known woodblock works on eroded sandpaper, the book is less a catalogue than a short, but impressive journey through the flowering career of a young artist making sense of the world through materiality.

A caveat: I might be biased. Among the texts in the book — an introduction by Sean O’ Toole, an interview with the artist by Marta Papini, and an essay by Natasha Becker — is a short story I wrote, largely based on Soal’s early life, work, and his relationship to Johannesburg.

Still, To Sharpen our Senses and Soften our Touch is a remarkable debut publication for a young South African artist and serves as an important moment in his career. It’s a book that’s be equally at home on the coffee table as it is wedged between the South African contemporary art and literature sections of your bookshelf.

Available from Skira.

Art and the Devil: the life story of an unfashionable painter — Reshada Crouse (2025)

What do good memoirs do? Ideally, we arrive at them for the story of a person and end up engaging the story of a city, an industry, a country. Good memoirs fold history into personal narrative while giving the reader a speculative glance towards the future. In Reshada Crouse’s memoir, Art and the Devil: the life story of an unfashionable painter, we get a narrative that is part memoir and part art criticism. Somewhere in between, there is an interesting view on art-making in South Africa from the height of apartheid into a newly democratic nation.

Over the course of 400 or so pages, Crouse tells the story of her life and work in a frank and conversational style. We hear of her time at the whites-only Pietermaritzburg University of Natal campus in the 1970s, and we hear of her first trip abroad, leading to encounters with the European Masters — Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Children becomes something of a touchstone in the book. There are first loves, first children, heartbreaks, great upheavals and subsequent joys. This is, after all, the stuff of memoir. But each moment is linked to Crouse’s work as an artist, and keenly reflected upon through this lens. As such, Crouse puts forward arguments around feminism, religion, South African art education and more, and this is the real value of Art and the Devil — outside of the strictures of South African art history, we are given a frank and anecdotal account of what it meant to make and engage with art from the 1970s onwards.

There are pitfalls, too. Where Crouse may have reflected more on the role of apartheid-era art education at a tertiary institution and how this shaped the country’s collective approach and response to art, she instead spends a bizarre amount of words trying to call out the hypocrisy of liberal, English-speaking whites who, she’s convinced, treated her differently on account of her Afrikaans accent. Such is the danger of writing the self without an interlocutor — all stories are important, all perspectives urgent. In short, the book would have greatly benefited from a stricter editorial eye.

Still, Art and the Devil is an engaging and insightful book, and unique for its way of blending personal narrative with informed arts writing, making it a book for art-lovers and memoirists alike.

Available from Reshada Crouse

AFRICAN ART: The ARAK Collection — Ashraf Jamal (Skira, 2025)

The ARAK Collection, based in Doha, Qatar is a single private collection of more than 4000 works by artists from Sub-Saharan Africa. AFRICAN ART: The ARAK Collection doesn’t speak to the full collection, but it does feature over 100 works of art from the continent.

With a series of interconnected essays by South African critic Ashraf Jamal, organised according to the themes of Abstraction, Portraiture, and Place, and shorter texts by writers and curators Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti and Neoma Angela Okorie, the book is an entry point to this relatively young, but enormous collection of African art outside of the continent.

Again, I may hold some bias. I helped put the book together and contributed its foreword, but so it goes with independent art writing in South Africa — it’s a small, but vibrant art market, and you end up working on a little bit of everything.

Still, I’m not just here to sing the book’s praises. While it is a monumental publication, the title ‘AFRICAN ART’ is a little vague. A hundred or so artworks by about as many artists is really only a sample of the kind of work coming out of Africa. More specifically, it’s largely the Sub-Saharan part of the continent that these artists are drawn from. So, if it’s a continental survey you’re looking for, keep in mind that it’ll be mediated through the lens of a private collection. But the book is also not simply a vanity publication. Beyond sampling some of the most exciting and enduring artists in the collection, the book is a testament to the projects that are facilitated by ARAK — Jamal has run many an art-writing workshop for ARAK, and the two other authors are both recipients of curatorial and writing residencies with ARAK.

It’s a hefty title, with a good balance of longer critical and prose-based texts, and shorter biographical texts. Open it up on any page and dive in.

Available from Skira.

Review | Art Book round-up: From Jane Alexander to Reshada Crouse was originally published in David Mann on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Review | The studio is a metaphor for the world in William Kentridge’s Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot

For Books24, a review of William Kentridge’s book, Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot.

“How do we know our place in the world?” asks William Kentridge. He is standing in his studio beside two different landscape drawings in charcoal. The one, he explains, is a reproduction of a landscape painting that used to hang over his grandparents dining room table — mountains, streams, dappled light. “No,” says another Kentridge, standing beside the second landscape. “We had none of this. There was no mountain. The only mountain we had was the mine dumps… there was no river. We had, at most, a ditch.”

It’s one of many moments in Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot where Kentridge meditates on memory, mark-making, belonging, and more through short and sometimes sardonic quarrels with a more critical version of himself. It’s a familiar relationship — artist and critic, dreamer and realist, optimist and pessimist — and one that shapes and drives the narrative of the nine-part film and recent publication.

For many artists, the studio is a sacred or deeply personal place. It’s a generative space, where work is carefully thought through and puzzled out before it meets the world. This is true for Kentridge, too, though for him the studio is also a metaphor for the world, and therefore a deeply porous realm.

Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot isn’t a retrospective, but many of the artist’s early works and recognisable works are there — the binoculared officials of Tide Table, the bustling Johannesburg city grid of Other Faces, as well as the early characters, the anxious Felix Teitelbaum and the pinstriped industrialist Soho Eckstein, both borrowing from Kentridge’s likeness. Then there is the newer work — the film accompaniment to Shostakovich’s symphony no. 10, Oh to Believe in Another World, the opera documenting Africa’s involvement in the first World War, The Head & The Load, and the chamber opera Waiting for the Sibyl with its prophetic aphorisms about death, ambition, and halted progress. Here, process and collaboration are foregrounded, detailing the conversations, decisions, and incidental moments that emerge in the act of making.

Over the course of the nine instalments, Kentridge makes a series of arguments — often literally arguing with himself — around ways of seeing and being in the world, how history and power echo into the present, fate, desire, erasure, failure, stupidity and more. His drawings, operas, films and sculptures are the materials he uses to illustrate these arguments, and the studio, of course, is both the lectern and the seat in the lecture hall. Filmed during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, the film also carries the strange quality of isolation and yearning that characterised the period. The overarching narrative arc is one of deep solitude — Kentridge alone in studio, drawing — followed by bouts of intense collaboration.

The film series first came out in 2024 on the streaming platform Mubi, and has had episodes screened at exhibitions and festivals around the world, premiering at the Venice Biennale. The book, published by Kentridge’s new international gallery, Hauser & Worth, and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers, came out this year and is essentially a transcription of the dialogue in the film series, as well as an array of images — artworks, film stills, handwritten notes and drawings — packed into 800 pages. So, with the film series being such a successful format, why a book?

It’s a question the artist and writer Terry Kurgan has as well. Speaking with Kentridge at the packed Johannesburg launch at Goodman gallery in late August, she is curious about the choice to commit an online film series to paper.

“It’s partly to have a record,” Kentridge responds. “In the way that an opera has a libretto to keep it alive. This series is being shown on Mubi now, but it may not always be in the world in this way and so the book becomes the record.”

But this is also a way of working for Kentridge — creating, documenting, picking apart, rearranging and sending back out in a different form. As he notes in his introduction to the book: “The world is invited into the studio. There it is fragmented. The fragments are rearranged and sent back out into the world as a drawing, a performance or a text.”

Earlier this year, Kentridge held a solo exhibition at Goodman’s Johannesburg gallery titled To Cross One More Sea, named after his film of the same name, and featuring many of the drawings, puppets, and works on paper from his monumental new chamber opera project with The Centre for the Less Good Idea, The Great Yes, the Great No. While the opera has been staged in numerous countries abroad, exhibitions like this one make use of the materials from the studio and the workshop floor, to provide a fragmented view of both process and of the discoveries made in the studio towards the final project.

The puppets, for example, with their metal and paper bodies in miniature, find full realisation in the human-sized puppets in The Great Yes, the Great No, while the three-channel film contains the enduring refrain of the women’s chorus, a central choral component of the chamber opera.

Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot, the book, adopts a similar approach, distilling, reappropriating, and presenting the material of the film series in book form. Yet, the book is more than an accompaniment to the film series. As a publication, it does the work of gathering the frenetic, disparate marks, gestures, thoughts and phrases generated in the studio, and puts them in a sequence and format that allows for pause, for breath, for the unappreciated act of sitting with an image and allowing it to affect you, change you.

Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is also a joy to page through. Key scenes from the film series are replicated here, frame by frame across a handful of pages, allowing for the pleasure of leafing through the book and watching a landscape change, a figure dance, a building collapse. Other pages echo the philosophy of the studio in their transparency and porousness, allowing the mark and the text of the page to bleed through to the next, changing its composition or disrupting its logic.

Though the film series is undeniably engaging, with its gorgeous soundscapes and considered cuts (lauded editor Walter Murch worked as lead editor on the film, assisted by Kentridge’s studio team), there’s a quiet contemplation about the book that feels singular, rare. Then again, my love of printed words may sway my opinion. As the critic says to the artist: “Love of words is love of self.” It’s one of only a few moments that they seem to agree about something, if only because they’re understanding it differently.

Review | The studio is a metaphor for the world in William Kentridge’s Self-Portrait as a… was originally published in David Mann on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The artist Nava Derakshani and I met in 2022 when she formed part of Season 9 of The Centre for the Less Good Idea. A few years later, when I was in New York, she showed me around Manhattan and we got to talking about the parallels between the USA and South Africa when it comes to collaboration, art-making and more. This year, as she prepared to return to South Africa for a while, we picked up our conversation in a Google Doc, discussing the relationship between cities, travel, and distance in her practice.

Daily Maverick ran an edited-down version of our conversation. You can read the full piece below and on Nava’s website.

Movement necessitates change. The act of travelling to different places with new contexts shifts our ways of seeing and engaging with the world, and influences our understanding of the places we’ve journeyed from. This is true of artists, too. In addition to training, collaboration, and exploration, an artist’s practice is deeply affected by the places in which they live and work.

The artist Nava Derakshani has, over the years, worked across ceramics, performance, photography, video, and installation, moving from architectural studies to artistic practice. Born in Southern Africa to Iranian parents, Derakshani has lived, studied, and worked in cities including Cape Town, Mbabane, Gaborone, Johannesburg, and New York, where she has recently completed her MFA at Hunter College.

In this conversation, Derakshani speaks to David Mann about her evolving practice, and how different cities — along with their particular socio-economic and political contexts, environments, histories, and ways of working — have necessitated key shifts in her approach to art-making.

David Mann: In preparation for this conversation, I was going through your website, and one of the things that’s interesting to me is how many forms your practice has taken over the years. There is the move from architecture to photography to collage, then into performance, and most recently, ceramics and sculpture. I know that quite a few of these changes have been facilitated through different institutions — UCT, Stellenbosch, Hunter — but I’m more interested in what’s remained, through these iterations, as a conceptual throughline or central interest in your work. What, for you, runs through all of these practices, mediums, and bodies of work?

Nava Derakshani: For me, the impulse has been around art making through material exploration, and the seeking of joy through the specific medium. Clay, for example, is a grounding material that requires patience and attentiveness from the maker. I wanted to become a master thrower, and that requires dedicated, meditative attention. I cannot throw well on days when I have had an argument, for example. The act of repetition for mastery is very attractive to me and is part of the artistic process and growth of an artist. I had the privilege of making a number of iterations of my performance piece with new collaborators, and this contributed to the work’s evolution with the input of my collaborators’ expertise. I see materials as tools to accomplish the art that I am seeking; the more tools I have in my box, the more freedom I have to make new work.

At the same time, there are thematic throughlines in all of my work. Studying architecture at the University of Cape Town gave me a spatial understanding of the remnants of apartheid’s segregation in Cape Town and the deep injustices perpetuated on the city scale. My investigation into my family’s migration stories highlighted the traumas my parents and their peers endured. Their exile was bequeathed to me, placing me in a constant state of yearning for the unattainable. Critical engagement with my inherited Orientalisms, the mediation of second-hand access to a forbidden homeland, and the inevitable romanticising and distortion that comes through this mitigated translation of culture. I think this is a common experience in the Global Diaspora and is something I grapple with in my art: a longing for belonging that just can’t be. Themes along lines of gender are always present with me, from playfully poking fun at global patriarchies or exploring themes of beauty and self-expression. The South African discourse on feminism, and through a diasporic Persian and Iranian lens, is a part of me.

That constant state of yearning you talk about feels like it charges a lot of your work. Part of it feels related to place — creating work about your ancestry and identity while based in Cape Town, or staging an iteration of a performance in New York that holds a distinctly South African style of collaboration — but I wonder what the distance lends your practice. A critical distance, maybe? Do you think you’d be making the same kind of work in Tehran, for example? Or eSwatini?

Being in New York, I identify as a double immigrant, responding to the language they use here as a “first” or “second-generation” migrant. It’s interesting being here because the discourse is centred on New York / the USA, and there is hardly room for thinking of Africa or South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) as a centre, or the centre, or even of local cultures as central. It asked me for a lot of adaptation to translate my positionality in this context. I feel critical of the Global North’s pervasive role in geopolitics, while still choosing to situate myself here. It seems to be a leap to decentre global whiteness. I think of The Curio Shop, presented by the Asian American artists collective Godzilla in 1993. The show was a direct response to stereotypes of Chinese / Asian tropes, through an uncomfortable leaning into and exaggerating of stereotypes associated with Asians by using the motif of a Chinatown souvenir store. For me, this is still centred on a dominant North American POV, rather than focusing on peripheral cultures as central. On the other hand, the discourse I come from in South Africa is a rejection of a peripheral status and a focus on our perspective as not only important, but central. My use of the Farsi language, therefore, is inherently subversive. My South African style of collaboration, as you call it, is less individualistic and was about the input of the artists that I was working with, to make something amazing together.

I was at the Guggenheim recently to see Rashid Johnson’s show. He leans deeply on what he refers to as black identity markers, such as shea butter, black wax and soap, and African tropes such as masks and zebra skins, the wilderness, and the occasional guest feature of Persian carpets in his “black yoga” pieces. I think it’s interesting how tropes of identity are uncomfortably exaggerated or simplified in the diaspora, and how our positionality lends itself to a removed sensibility and a longing for something that is simply unattainable, in an effort for place-making in the places we exist.

I can’t imagine the kind of work I would make in Tehran because it simply is not an option for me. When I look at artists in the country, their political response is one of subversion and deceit as they negotiate a deeply censored and monitored art space, using the gallery to make statements that unfold over time to reveal hidden meanings, because they have to submit government proposals for their shows. We can look at similar examples of art made by artists in Africa, where the use of materials and gestures is embedded in a framework of understanding within the culture and place. El Anatsui’s use of bottle tops, or his cargo canvases, for example. They make so much sense to me, while they also translate into the Western gaze, where there is an emphasis on materiality. Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message still holds strongly in a contemporary art space. And I think if I were making art in eSwatini, it would be material-heavy, responding to the geography and climate of my birthplace.

I like what you say about “a removed sensibility”. The South African writer Zoë Wicomb passed away last year, and I’ve been revisiting her work. She wrote so intimately and with such lucidity about South African life, but all from the UK, where she moved to when she was 22. So, there’s something to be said about that removal from the place you’re speaking back to in your work — how that distance allows for a view of “the centre” from the margins, so to speak.

You shared an artwork the other day, and it struck me how the use of light is put to work as a kind of prompt for performance or engagement — the projected text requiring a processional, almost devotional walk around the sculpture in order to be read. It seems like there’s something similar going on with the sculptures you made during your time at Hunter, particularly the Golden Samovar sculpture, which required a different navigation from the audience and came ‘alive’ through the use of water. Could you tell me a bit about that work, and maybe about your time at Hunter as well? It seems like your practice underwent a significant shift while you were there.

It’s interesting to use these two works as a comparison: one is, as you say, devotional and memorial in nature, the other is satirical, cynical, and humorous. They both speak to gender, but in drastically different tones and media.

The light sculpture emerged from my performance piece involving light and shadow. I was still deeply moved by a feminist uprising in Iran and the diaspora following the state murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, combined with the discovery of Hunter’s laser cutter.

I started making cutouts with the machine from photos documenting graffiti in Iran at the time. City walls became sites for revolutionary messages, which were routinely cleaned or marked out by the authorities, only to be rewritten, censored again, and then rewritten again. This became a public dialogue of repression and defiance, written and rewritten over and over again by an unruly public, and witnessed on the internet. I used the graffiti wall texts, with their dripping, spray-painted, handwritten lines, to make luminous objects. This was an act that refused their censorship in Iran, by effusing their words on the other side of the planet.

This was the power of diaspora in that unusually unified moment. For a while, almost all Iranians were united and in a deep solidarity with one another. While those in Iran were being suppressed, the diaspora was amplifying their stories and creating massive momentum internationally, with huge protest marches, where one in Berlin amounted to approximately 100,000 people who travelled in bus-fulls from around the region.

My Baha’i upbringing fed me stories of a feminist figure, Tahirih, who boldly unveiled herself in a public gathering in 19th-century Persia. Named “The Pure One,” her act was deeply unsettling to her pious peers, and her message was clear: the time for women’s equality is now. To me, the young women burning their headscarves in Tehran, in circles reminiscent of witch fables, girls holding hands, one covered and another with her long, thick hair on her back, reminded me of Tahirih and the power of her act that led to her execution, a similar fate met by many protestors in Iran.

The use of our languages is meaningful when prejudices have been weaponised to justify painful international policies. It is in itself a bold act, and taken up by the diaspora, where gold name-necklaces and T-shirts saying Brooklyn or New York in Farsi/Arabic text are popular. And now, New York City has elected its first charismatic Muslim-Ugandan-Indian rapper as mayor. To mark ourselves as present in places that actively Other us is meaningful.

To speak about the Golden Samovar, there are many entry points to this installation, but the South African one is Brett Murray’s African Maquette (2000) sculpture that I would walk past on my daily commute to work in Cape Town, alongside many other working residents of the city. In the piece, copies of cartoon character Bart Simpson’s head are welded to a copy of an African curio. I enjoy the humour and political satire in this work, and Murray’s willingness to play with his positionality.

Similarly, my installation exaggerates a quintessential tea vessel into an inharmonious, tenuous tower with multiple spouts attached to its form, while pulling on romanticised memories of an abundant samovar providing tea in an Iranian household. The Farsi phrase doodool tala / golden penis is called on to playfully point to the differential treatment people are given because of body parts, and the often dysfunctional absurdity of gender roles. The way a visitor spends time with these artworks is experiential. They both require movement and a level of immersion to experience them. The risk of water spitting on you from the Golden Samovar’s fountain, the necessity to circumnavigate the light sculpture to decipher its wording.

I’m interested in your reflections on Zoë Wicomb’s writing, and can compare them to the memories of my mother and her friends. They left their country in their early twenties, too, but talk incessantly of Iran. It’s like a love affair that they never fully recovered from. A precious place and memory that they nurture in a secret corner of their hearts, and tell their children of, in a bereaving act of something lost, a sense of home; special, unique, unequal. Iran is perpetually their center, no matter how much they have been removed from it, as I think Africa is mine.

In 2022, you developed an interdisciplinary performance at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Maboneng, Johannesburg. The work, Meet Me Between Tehran and Mbabane, referenced the revolution being led by young women across Iran at the time, as well as themes of migration, identity, and belonging. I was able to witness the making of that work, and what struck me was how your visual sensibilities met with the performance-based methodologies of The Centre — how your collaborations with dancers and musicians led to the shadow-play in the work, and its overall visual and choreographic language.

You staged Meet Me Between Tehran and Mbabane in New York in 2023. I’m interested in what that experience was like. In South Africa, we tend to collaborate almost instinctually — it’s a way of making and thinking about creative work that feels inherent. How did the work, and the process of re-making it, change in New York?

It’s special to me that you witnessed this show develop David; it is something I am proud of. I was quite out of my comfort zone making such a detailed, performative, and choreographed piece accompanied by skilled musicians. I had ideas and gestures in my mind, stories and histories stirring within me, and the agitation of the historical moment we were witnessing. I needed to make a piece that reflected the multitudes I was experiencing, and to translate that multitude into something felt by my audience. While the piece was based on the women’s movements in Iran, it was made in South Africa, a country that has a ridiculous rate of femicide and gender-based violence. The two-wall projection at the Centre echoed the parallels women are grappling with globally. Bongile Lecoge-Zulu gifted me with deep and sympathetic listening as she helped me direct the piece at the Centre, and I feel indebted to my cast of dancers, puppeteer, musician, and the curators that I was working with on Season 9. I felt supported and cared for in a tumultuous time, as I sat at night to cut out my paper figures for the shadow work, or painted my Farsi calligraphy on the skirts that Nthabiseng Malaka designed for my show.

This work grew with me as I adapted it from Johannesburg to New York City. I was given an incredible opportunity to develop the piece at The Centre, where I had access to talented collaborators, as well as support structures that The Centre spoiled me with: costume design, lighting (central to this work), curatorial insight from Athena Mazarakis and Mandla Mbothwe, promotional materials and programming, and financial backing.

Recreating the work in New York required me to start from scratch in terms of finding collaborators, sourcing costumes, figuring out the lighting, and promoting the work. It was a tough transition, but the nesting that The Centre provided me with was a solid foundation to build from and grow the work with. I used the opportunity that NYC afforded me in terms of the diverse immigrant presence and a dedication to the arts to find collaborators who resonated with the work and who participated in remaking the piece from a place of passion and dedication. I had very limited funding to cover all the expenses, but I was supported by artists who were invested in the work, the messaging, and the meaning it provided all of us at the time. I found Iranian dancers trained in contemporary and traditional dance, who brought in their unique movements and flair. I found a gifted pianist, Shayan Azizi, who trained in classical Persian piano, worked as an ER doctor by day, and who took on the role of lead musical composer in the work. He led the collaboration with Congolese musician and percussionist Nkumu Katalay, who joined the team, to create a unique soundtrack with their combined musical talents. Tina Bararian took a personal interest in the piece and grew with the work, taking over the role of monologue (from me) while perfecting the dance and gestural movements choreographed by myself, traditional Persian dance expert, Nikki Farahanchi, and Dani Criss, who specialises in West African movement.

I initially referred to the whirling Sufi dervish in the piece. I was thinking about the contested form of Vernacular Islam, which integrated traditional spirituality into mysticism, and the persecution of the Baha’i religious minority in Iran. I was inspired by the daily acts of protest in the form of dance by women on streets and subways, an act that is illegal in Iran, and in opposition to a culture that loves to celebrate. As we developed the piece for a second time in NYC, we were confronted with the news from Gaza, and again, I was inspired by dance as remonstration. Amani was a Kurdish woman and was thought to be insignificant by the state because of her minority ethnic status. We integrated Kurdish dance movements as a nod to her and other persecuted groups. Criss integrated West African Dambala movements to represent freedom and transformation, and Azizi brought in folk music, which he reimagined with pop undertones. I am so pleased with this fusion-like outcome. We included accounts of people killed by the state, starting with 10 Baha’i women at the beginning of the new government in 1983. We cited the young protestor who asked his father “not to tell mom” and upset her with the news of his execution verdict, and we ended the list with the most recent state execution, which, depending on the day of the show, could have been as recent as “yesterday,” with shadow cutouts of their faces projected on the walls in solemn silence.

In my most recent iteration of the show, I was thinking of artists who invite their audiences to participate in their work. I was desperate for community in NYC, and also wanted to hold space for my audience, many of whom were sobbing quietly in the darkness of their seats. I drew on the Persian tradition of offering tea for hospitality, and invited my audience to join us on stage and share black Persian tea, or red South African rooibos. In the middle of winter, I hoped for this gesture of warm tea to offer respite from the heaviness of the show, and encourage new friendships of bud.

I used what I learnt at The Centre to step into a leadership role, inviting artists to bring in their expertise, guiding them along a vision, and creating something new from their input and ownership of the piece. So many people go into making a project like this, it is difficult to name everyone who supported the work, especially the institutions of The Centre for the Les Good Idea, Culture Hub LIC, and Mabou Mines. It was a fulfilling process, with a ton of obstacles to work through, in the very challenging do-it-yourself city that is New York.

Find out more about Derakshani’s multidisciplinary practice here.

Interview | A removed sensibility: in conversation with artist Nava Derakhshani was originally published in David Mann on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A storytelling workshop zine.

In January 2025, the artist Odette Graskie and I held a storytelling workshop in relation to her solo exhibition, Side Quest. Then we took all of the stories and doodles that came out of it, and made a zine at Pulp Paperworks.

We had a successful launch at Pulp’s store in 44 Stanley, and the zine went on to be exhibited and sold at the 2025 Open Book Festival, Johannesburg Art Fair, and Design Week in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Get your copy via Pulp!

Photos by Odette Graskie.

Zine | Side Quest was originally published in David Mann on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A new short story for artist Chris Soal’s monograph.

“But what seemed dull, derelict, or unremarkable to him then, now appears to him through the soft fog of nostalgia. Like the scars in the road, old cracks filled in with liquid bitumen and polished by the tires of countless commuters until they shimmer like a mirage — little rivulets of gold reflected in the headlights of his car.”

It’s an honour to have a story in this gorgeous new book on Chris Soal’s work. I remember writing on one of Chris’ first shows back in 2018, so it’s a real joy seeing how his practice has evolved over the years, and to be able to make sense of it, and its relationship to Johannesburg, through the lens of fiction.

Copies available at good bookstores and via Skira️.

Short Story | Wherever you go, there you are was originally published in David Mann on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The School of Journalism & Media Studies at 50

Makers & Shapers of Media tells the story of the School of Journalism and Media Studies (where I first learned how to wrangle words) over five decades, through a collection of essays by former students, staff, and current members of the school.

I co-edited the book with Tumelo Tladi, working closely with Anthea Garman and Taryn De Vega from the school.

It’s available at Exclusive Books and Bargain Books across the country, and your favourite indie stores (Love Books, Book Lounge etc).

Publication | Makers & Shapers of Media (2025) was originally published in David Mann on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As always, my gratitude to Nkgopoleng for her commitment to writing and thinking about art collectively, generatively, and openheartedly.

Dialogue | Reflections on Contra.Joburg and FNB Art Joburg was originally published in David Mann on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was asked to write the catalogue essay for the University of Johannesburg Creative Output exhibition, ‘In/Visible’ in 2024. It’s a group show of work by lecturers in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture (FADA) that takes place annually at the FADA Gallery.

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ESSAY | In/Visible Catalogue Preface (2024) was originally published in David Mann on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have a new short story out in the latest Short.Sharp.Stories anthology, One Life.

‘This is Graffiti’ is a story about risk and about boyhood, accessed through the sounds, sights and smells of graffiti, with all of its signature flair, choreography, language, fiery ambition and conflicting characters.

The story was also ‘Highly Commended’ by the editors.

It’s a real honour to be published in this anthology. I’ve been reading it for years and have seen what it’s done for so many South African writers’ careers. Get your copy at all good bookstores.

Short Story | This is Graffiti was originally published in David Mann on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The good folks from the Brooklyn-based publication Strange Matters reached out to ask if I’d contribute a short story to their 4th issue, dealing with art and the city. The result is ‘Faultlines’, a story set in the detritus of the Lilian Ngoyi street explosion in Johannesburg.

The Uber driver’s name is ‘Jealous,’ number plate: 569 285GP. He pulls up on Keyes, outside the Trumpet building in Rosebank’s art district. Dineo checks the numberplate to be sure, climbs into the back seat and takes out her phone.

‘On my way, just finished up at the YANNICK opening, heading to town now. Everything okay?’ Send. A yellow thumbs-up emoji appears.

It’s the last day of the Art Fair and the closing event of the Creative City programme, an initiative that aims to ‘activate’ the pre-existing infrastructure of inner-city art projects, and ‘re-connect’ the Art Fair’s VIP audiences to the city.

Dineo works for the Art Fair as a project manager and PR strategist. Her background is in journalism, but she doesn’t do much of that these days. Who does?

This year, the Art Fair secured its first headline sponsor, a 120-year-old mining corporation founded shortly after the gold rush that saw Johannesburg rise out of the Highveld. The 2024 fair is now titled the SaxonGold Jozi Art Fair. Or just ‘Art Fair’ for short.

She opens up her chat with Johan from Big Boyz Tactical. ‘Hi Johan. Are your guys on site?’ A white thumbs-up emoji comes back.

The Creative City programme hasn’t been much of a success. Nobody attended the open studios, choosing to stay at the Art Fair instead, sipping wine and schmoozing, maybe doing a little bit of shopping afterwards at the nearby mall. ‘Safety’ was one of the main concerns, but truthfully, nobody wanted to travel into town to look at struggling artists. Dineo and her team had to make the closing event work. They had been tasked with facilitating a public, site-specific performance in and around the detritus of the Bree Street Explosion. This, Dineo was told, was in line with SaxonGold’s mandate to ‘highlight and address the enduring legacies of extractive mining practices in Southern Africa.’ They were in talks to sponsor a new theatre festival in Kimberly, too.

Just over a year ago, Bree Street — officially renamed Lillian Ngoyi Street a few years ago, but it never really caught on — exploded, leaving a ten metre-wide trench in the middle of the city. Investigations revealed that it was a methane gas explosion, but speculations ran wild at first. The most popular theory was that it was the fault of the zama-zamas, informal miners working illegally below the streets of the city, in search of gold dust and the mineral flotsam of its flooded mines. Many of the inner-city residents still choose to believe this. More than a year later, and the road has yet to be fixed, less a scar than an open wound. The closure continues to cause difficulty for commuters during the morning and evening rush, when the city’s many mini-bus taxis routinely enter into a dramatic gridlock, all blaring hooters and idling engines in the heat and smog of the city. As with many tragedies in Johannesburg, public life simply pivots, and continues around it.

Read the full story over at Strange Matters.

Short story | Faultlines was originally published in David Mann on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.