ART AFRICA reported on the South African presentation of Lumières d’Afriques at Standard Bank Gallery in 2020. Organised through African Artists for Development, the touring exhibition assembled works by 54 artists, each associated with a different African country, around questions of light and access to energy. Contributions spanned photography, painting, textiles and sculpture, including works by Paa Joe, Athi-Patra Ruga and Nolan Oswald Dennis.
ART AFRICA reported in February 2020 that Esther Mahlangu had created an artwork for the dashboard display of a specially commissioned Rolls-Royce Phantom. The project adapted her Ndebele-inspired geometric painting to the car’s interior. According to the announcement, part of the sale proceeds would support her art school in Mpumalanga and a retrospective exhibition. These were stated plans, rather than independently verified disbursements.
Reflecting on an Ernest Mancoba symposium at Cape Town’s A4 Foundation, ArtThrob argues that fixed artistic and national categories can flatten a complex life. The essay considers Mancoba’s movement between South Africa and Europe, his family’s collaborative intellectual life, and his work across abstraction and figuration. It welcomes renewed attention while questioning attempts to fit the artist neatly into a single modernist or national canon.
ArtThrob’s review of Michael Armitage’s Accomplice at Norval Foundation examined paintings responding to Kenya’s 2017 elections. Drawing on a conversation between the artist and curator Owen Martin, it considered how moving bodies, landscapes and blurred imagery convey political experience. The critic also explored Armitage’s use of Lubugo bark cloth, whose uneven surface becomes part of the paintings’ composition and connects material choices with cultural history.
ArtThrob reviewed Givan Lötz’s Unearthly at Cape Town’s AVA Gallery in early 2020, focusing on the relationship between textured paintings and sculptural forms. Encaustic surfaces and assembled branches encouraged connections between imagined landscapes, bodily sensations and natural cycles. The critic saw the exhibition’s refusal of easily recognizable shapes as an invitation to reconsider human assumptions about the world, praising its capacity to sustain uncertainty rather than resolve it.
ArtThrob’s preview of the 2020 Investec Cape Town Art Fair highlighted film screenings, public discussions and gallery events alongside the commercial booths. Its selections included work by Nnenna Okore, Bonolo Kavula, Sungi Mlengeya and Mawande Ka Zenzile. The guide connected material experimentation with broader conversations about Black women’s subjectivity, museums and sustainable art platforms, offering a record of the fair’s wider cultural programme.
In a 2020 ART AFRICA interview, Alida Rodrigues explained how collected photographs and botanical imagery developed into The Secret History of Plants. By altering historical portraits, she questions the histories attached to them and the colonial gaze preserved in photographic archives. Rodrigues also described the ethical difficulty of working with images of Black subjects. The series was announced for This Is Not a White Cube’s Cape Town Art Fair presentation.
In a 2020 review, ArtThrob brought together Igshaan Adams’s stukkinne stories and Sabelo Mlangeni’s The Royal House of Allure at blank projects. Adams’s textiles and sculptures drew on domestic histories in Bonteheuwel, while Mlangeni’s photographs followed life within a queer household in Lagos. The review traced connections between material traces, chosen family and intimacy, considering how both practices resist the disappearance of overlooked experiences.
In its review of Barthélémy Toguo’s Bilongue at Stevenson Cape Town, ArtThrob considered how portraits of people in Douala brought contemporary life into conversation with colonial archives. Watercolours, drawings and carved wooden faces explored memory and human connection. The critic interpreted photographs inserted into portraits and stamp-like borders as challenges to imposed accounts of African history, emphasizing care and empathy as central to the exhibition’s treatment of its subjects.
ArtThrob·
Ibrahim Mahama at Art Basel in Switzerland on 20 June 2025. Mahama participated in the inaugural Stellenbosch Triennale in 2020.Bea Phi · CC BY-SA 4.0
ArtThrob announced the first Stellenbosch Triennale under the theme Tomorrow there will be more of us. Curated by Khanyisile Mbongwa and Bernard Akoi-Jackson, the non-commercial programme combined a major exhibition with On the Cusp, a presentation of younger African artists. Free admission and venues near underserved communities formed part of its stated commitment to access. The announced programme opened on 11 February 2020 and was scheduled through April.
ArtThrob announced a February 2020 gathering at Cape Town’s A4 Foundation devoted to Ernest Mancoba. Convened by Winnie Sze and Nomusa Makhubu, the programme combined scholarly presentations with artistic and musical responses to his work. Participants included Chika Okeke-Agulu, Same Mdluli and Dorthe Aagesen. The organisers aimed to encourage greater engagement in South Africa with an artist whose international recognition had recently grown.
ArtThrob reported that six projects had been selected from 123 entries for the inaugural Social Impact Arts Prize in 2020, launched by the Rupert Art Foundation and Rupert Museum. Finalists included The Long Table Project, Tears Become Rain and MIRAGE. The announcement outlined a museum presentation and planned installations in Graaff-Reinet, framing the award around creative projects intended to benefit the communities in which they were made.
ArtThrob’s February 2020 visual roundup presented selections from the 2019 graduate exhibitions at Cape Town Creative Academy and Stellenbosch University. The gallery-style article identified participating artists, including Chloe Etheridge, Hanna Noor Mahomed, Lizelle Kirsten and Ruhini Naik. It offered a route into emerging practices through photographs rather than extended criticism; readers can view the works and accompanying names on the original publication.
Following Santu Mofokeng’s death on 26 January 2020, ART AFRICA reflected on the South African photographer’s patient attention to everyday life, faith and community. The account traced his work with Afrapix and the University of the Witwatersrand’s Oral History Project, alongside photographs made in Bloemhof. It also discussed Stories, the substantial photobook publication that brought together decades of his archive.
ART AFRICA’s February 2020 announcement outlined a free Stellenbosch Triennale programme featuring artists from across Africa. It identified Khanyisile Mbongwa with the principal curatorial exhibition and Bernard Akoi-Jackson with On the Cusp, a platform for emerging practitioners. The announced programme combined exhibitions, performance and discussion under the theme Tomorrow there will be more of us, with venues distributed around the town.
A February 2020 ART AFRICA preview outlined Strauss & Co’s Cape Town contemporary auction, scheduled alongside the city’s art fair. The catalogue included work by Nicholas Hlobo, Athi-Patra Ruga and Simphiwe Ndzube, plus a collector’s group of works spanning several African countries. Photography and textile practices featured prominently. The article reported proposed lots and estimates; it did not establish final sale prices or results.
In a February 2020 ArtThrob interview, Investec Cape Town Art Fair director Laura Vincenti discussed expanding participation from galleries elsewhere in Africa, including Tunisia, Angola and Côte d’Ivoire. She described sustained conversations with exhibitors and the fair’s role in connecting continental and international markets. The interview records the organiser’s ambitions for greater exchange, ahead of the 14–16 February edition at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.
ART AFRICA previewed Delicate/Tendency/Response, a 2020 solo exhibition by DuduBloom More following her Cassirer Welz Award. Presented by the Bag Factory at Kalashnikovv Gallery in Johannesburg, the new work used thread, wool, paper, inks and other materials to consider traumatic memory and the ways it can be triggered. The artist framed the exhibition around questions of awareness, response and healing.
ArtThrob’s January 2020 review of Otobong Nkanga’s Acts at the Crossroads at Zeitz MOCAA considers how her drawings, textiles, photographs and installations connect bodies, land and resource extraction. The critic reads the survey through networks of mutual influence rather than a hierarchy separating humanity from nature. Works including Social Consequences II and Taste of a Stone become starting points for questions about ecological damage, labour and cultural memory.
ArtThrob·
Abdoulaye Konaté, photographed on 5 February 2020. Contextual artist portrait, not the Zeitz MOCAA installation. Photo: KAG1LP2MDIAKITE, CC BY-SA 4.0.KAG1LP2MDIAKITE · CC BY-SA 4.0
ART AFRICA announced a monumental Abdoulaye Konaté textile installation for Zeitz MOCAA’s atrium in February 2020. The work honours Malian historian Youssouf Tata Cissé and French anthropologist Germaine Dieterlen, drawing on knowledge systems associated with Mali. Made with woven and dyed cloth, its large composition connects commemoration and material practice. The museum planned to unveil it on 12 February 2020 for a year-long presentation.
