East Africa in spotlight at Joburg Art Fair

Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, known for her extensive body of mixed-media work that includes sculpture, painting, collage, performance and video work, has been announced as the featured artist at this year’s FNB Joburg Art Fair, which runs from September 9 to 11 at the Sandton Convention Centre.

Mutu, an award-winning and internationally acclaimed cult artist, is known for her otherworldly interrogations of gender, colonialism and race in her work.

In South Africa, she will be exhibiting a film and sculptural installation presented at the Keyes Art Mile, a new art space and precinct developed by Cape Town’s Whatiftheworld Gallery and design platform Southern Guild, opening in Johannesburg in August.

The art fair will also feature 80 exhibitions, including special projects, contemporary and modern art, and solo projects from 17 countries across Africa, the United States and Europe.

This year, the curatorial focus of the fair’s special projects programme is the artistic landscape of East Africa. It will feature works and galleries from countries such as Kenya, Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan.

In addition, the fair will host the inaugural TEDx Johannesburg Salon Talks centred on Africa’s contemporary visual arts. There will be a day of talks by artists, curators and scholars at Sandton’s Auto & General Theatre on the Square, presented in association with Ogojiii magazine. Mail & Guardian contributor, writer, filmmaker and photographer Lidudumalingani Mqombothi has won the 2016 Caine prize for African writing. The writer, who quietly shared his travels from Cape Town to the United Kingdom on Instagram in the run-up to the announcement at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, had kept mum on his nomination for the esteemed prize, which awards him £10 000 and a month’s residence at Georgetown University as a writer in residence.

Mqombothi, who was interviewed by Friday writer Kwanele Sosibo last month, won the prize for Memories We Lost, a short story set in an Eastern Cape village about two young sisters, one living with schizophrenia and the other her relentless protector.

Together they negotiate the difficulties of mental illness against a backdrop of traditionalism.

Having won an award that authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have been shortlisted for, Mqombothi’s writing life is certainly about to change.