February, the month of art, not love

January felt like an entire year unto itself and February is already petitioning for its own Gregorian calendar. Cliché-clingers insist on calling February the month of love. I am calling it the month of art.

Penny Siopis’s Love in a Turning World opened at Stevenson this past Saturday and remains on view until March 21. I missed it. I didn’t get the invite. I was across town at the Norval Foundation in Steenberg, attending Karel Nel’s Closer and Far book launch. I love, love, love Penny Siopis’s improvisatory, call-and-response mode of working with glue and ink. In this latest show, Siopis says she is not painting love as a picture, but painting love as a way of being with others, with the world and even with the unpredictable. I am reliably informed that she will also be launching her Atlas paintings book next week.

Zizipho Poswa opens her fifth solo exhibition at Southern Guild this afternoon wherein she explores the Xhosa practice of Imbeleko with clay. Justine Mahoney Pareidolia solo exhibition of oil paintings runs concurrently at this same gallery. Both on until April 16.

Willem Boshoff also opened his Blind Alphabet exhibition at Everard Read Cape Town last Thursday. It closes on February 25. Soon. The irony of me urging you to ‘see’ this show is not lost on me. The works are in Braille and it features small boxes housing sculptures that cannot be opened by sighted hands. I would highly advise bringing along a blind friend for this exhibition.

I had the good fortune to encounter an impromptu walkabout with blind poet and songwriter, Jacques Coetzee, who proceeded to ‘read’ and open most of the thirty-five wire baskets that were individually perched on black boxes. Each contained a sculptural rendering of an obscure word. Watching Coetzee move across the room, fingertips translating raised dots into language, felt almost illicit. The fluency just seemed improbable.

Boshoff has outdone himself. The installation resembles a war veterans’ graveyard. Austere. Regimented. Unexpectedly beautiful. And I am sorry to say this again, but you have to ‘see’ it.

Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi, Mary Sibande, Teresa Kutala Firmino, Keabetswe Seema, Rebaone Finger and Katlego C.L Twala are also all on show at Everard Read until February 28.

There’s also the Nando’s Creative Exchange at the AVA Gallery. Four emerging South African artists; Debbie Field, Fleur de Bondt, Mduduzi Twala and Sello Letswalo - respond to the theme of “space” through their art. On until March 5.

And then there’s the 13th edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, looming over us like a storm. It opens next weekend at the CTICC and brings together hundreds of artists, galleries, curators, speakers and special projects from around the world.

Cape Times