Zanele Muholi is a photographer and visual activist based in Johannesburg. Muholi’s work has been recognized for its radical emphasis on marginalized communities in South Africa, exploring queerness, blackness, femininity, and the intersections in between. Her photographs are an attempt to create an archive and dialogue surrounding both blatant and epistemic violence against black queer communities in South Africa. “This is a time for a visual state of emergence,” she says. “The preservation and mapping of our herstories is the only way for us black lesbians to be visible.”

Across her work, she chronicles that which is systematically erased from both South African and international narratives: lesbian weddings, trans men dressing in tuxedos, survivors of ‘corrective rape,’ lovers in bed together. Muholi’s pictorial archive offers visibility to the invisible, history to the erased, and celebration to the stigmatized.

Despite their political potency, Muholi’s portraits do not exploit their subjects for a progressivist agenda. They are deeply intimate, sensitive, and organic: close-ups of women kissing, dancing at weddings, bathing in colorful baths. This kind of representation challenges the centuries-long project to commodity the black female body as the African other and the object of a patriarchal colonial imagination. ‘I refused to become subject matter for others and to be silenced,’ says Muholi. ‘Many have exiled our female African bodies: by colonisers, by researchers, by men. Sarah Baartman became a spectacle for Europeans, and she died in a foreign land. She was never given a chance to speak for herself. It is for this reason that I say No, not yet another black body.’

What’s more, Muholi’s photographs are beautiful, visually stunning and immaculately rendered as they are socially exigent. Despite her growing popularity and widely positive reception over the course of the last decade, Muholi continues to document, photographing friends, strangers, communities on the fringe, and recently, herself. Looking at Muholi’s body of work as a singular, collective archive of history, identity, and experience, we are asked to question the types of images we see, the stories are told, the histories we are taught. Who is left out of that narrative? Who are we still not seeing? Zanele Muholi makes us see, makes us feel all the contradictions of looking: discomfort, sadness, pain, and radical joy.

Biography

Born in 1972, Muholi grew up in Umlazi, a township in Durban on the east coast of South Africa. She studied photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, where she celebrated her first solo exhibition 'Visual Sexuality: Only Half the Picture' held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004. Since then, Muholi’s work has attracted attention from academic circles, intersectional feminists, LGBTQI activists, and the international art world alike.

She co-founded the Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002, and in 2009 founded Inkanyiso (www.inkanyiso.org), a forum for queer and visual (activist) media. Dedicated to representing issues central to the black queer and trans communities in South Africa, she continues to facilitate photography workshops for young women in various townships. Muholi studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, and in 2009, completed an MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts/Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Muholi has won numerous awards including the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); the Outstanding International Alumni Award from Ryerson University (2016); the Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International; a Prince Claus Award (2013); the Index on Censorship – Freedom of Expression art award (2013); and the Casa Africa award for best female photographer and a Fondation Blachère award at Les Rencontres de Bamako biennial of African photography (2009). Her Faces and Phases series has shown at, among others, Documenta 13; the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale; and the 29th São Paulo Biennale. She was shortlisted for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for her Faces and Phases 2006 – 14 (Steidl/The Walther Collection). Muholi is currently included in the exhibition African Art against the State, on view at the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts through August 2016.

Sources

Zanele Muholi largely draws inspiration from local South African black queer communities, including herself and her friends. Her work is informed by a long history of oppressive colonization, which lays the structural foundation of how we imagine blackness, the female body, queer sexuality, and representation today. Her work is also informed by contemporary South African politics, a system that constitutionally protects the rights of queer people, but often fails to defend them from targeted violence.

Currently

For the past few years, Muholi has largely turned the camera around on herself, practicing self-documentation in the form of portraiture and performance. An ongoing project, “Somnyama Ngonyama” finds the artist using self-portraiture as a tool of intimacy, serving as commentary on contemporary political and cultural issues that affect black people in Africa and its diaspora. Her most recent exhibition will be on view until September 25th, 2016 as a part of Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in Arles, France. ”Somnyama Ngonyama” was also featured in a solo show at the Albany Museum in Grahamstown during the National Arts Festival. Muholi is additionally set to take part in the ninth annual Berlin Biennale, showing on the lightbox project “LIT” until September 2016. Her work will also be featured in group exhibitions highlighting lesbian history, activist art, and African creativity in Oslo, Norway; Barcelona, Spain; Port Louis, Mauritius; and Williams College, Massachusetts. 

This biography was written by Artthrob in collaboration with SAHO.

MODUS OPERANDI

 Mary Sibande - a sculptor, photographer, and visual artist based in Johannesburg - is interested primarily in questions of the body and how to reclaim the black female body in post-colonial and post-apartheid South Africa.

 She often works through an alter-ego, Sophie, a sculptural figure who traverses the uncanny valleys of liminal space. Sophie is personal. Her visage is modeled largely after the artist herself, and she draws on the history of the women in Sibande’s family who worked as maids throughout the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. But Sophie is also symbolic, a figure that stands in to speak for femininity, blackness, labour, post-coloniality, and communities on the margin as a whole. She moves in between history and contemporary life. Sophie bears the weight of centuries-old colonial narratives attempting to Other the African woman. At the same time, Sophie’s dress, the familiar bright blue of contemporary domestic uniforms, reminds us of the kinds of subjugation that lingers in our society.

 Sophie is both real and surreal: her calm disposition is juxtaposed with overflowing, colorful Victorian garb (I’m a Lady, 2010), or she is dressed in traditional maid attire, restitching the hem of a Superman cape (They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To, 2008). Sophie is both active and passive: the static sculpture, eyes closed, is but a still in a moment of glory, wielding a larger-than-life calvary mare (The Reign, 2010) or singing to a great, anonymous orchestra (Silent Symphony, 2010).

For all of the histories of oppression Sibande’s alter ego seeks to critique, she transcends above them, reclaiming her space as a subject in both historical and contemporary narratives. Ultimately, Sophie is a celebration. Sibande says, “My work is not about complaining about Apartheid, or an invitation to feel sorry for me because I am black and my mothers were maids. It is about celebrating what we are as women in South Africa today and for us to celebrate, we need to go back, to see what are we are celebrating. To celebrate, I needed to bring this maid.”

 In 2013, as a part of a new body of work entitled, Purple Must Govern, Sibande introduced the color purple as well as wild, organic, fluid movement to her signature black fiberglass sculptures. Though still political in nature (the color purple is a reference to a march that took place in Cape Town in 1989, where the police sprayed protesters with purple dye to mark them for arrest after the march), this new work was a departure (or expansion) from Sophie, asking broader questions about the dynamism of identity and performance. Sibande says, “The creatures are Sophie turned inside out. They are a look at intestines, an inspection of the mess within.This work is about deconstructing the familiar ideas built into my work. In other words, questioning what Sophie, the character, had dreamt of…In the process of letting go of older ideas of my work, I am opening doors for new challenges.”

BIOGRAPHY

Mary Sibande, born in Barberton, South African (1982), lives and works in Johannesburg. She obtained her Diploma in Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand Technikon (2004) and a B-Tech degree from the University of Johannesburg (2007). Her work was exhibited in the South African pavilion at the 2010 Venice Biennale, and her project "Long Live the Dead Queen" was found in murals all over the city of Johannesburg in 2010 during the FIFA World Cup.

 Sibande's work has been exhibited countrywide. In 2009 she took part in the L'Exposition du Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar, and her work was featured in the review From Pierneef to Gugulective: 1910-2010. Other galleries and events where her work has been shown include: the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (2010); the Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art in Helsinki, the Lyon Biënnale, the Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Paris (2013). She has been a research fellow at numerous institutions, including the Smithsonian Institute, the University of Michigan and the Ampersand Foundation.

 In 2013, Sibande had an artistic residency at the MAC/VAL Museum of Modern Art in France. where she created a groundbreaking new installation entitled A reversed retrogress. scene 2. That same year, Sibande received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award. Her work The Purple Shall Govern toured South Africa from Grahamstown, though Port Elizabeth to Bloemfontein, Kimberley and Potchefstroom, ending in Johannesburg in early 2014.

 SOURCES

 Largely, Sibande’s work draws inspiration from her individual experience growing up in South Africa. The artist’s focus on “the maid” is often cited as homage to her family, of which four generations of women served as domestic workers. Other family figures serve as visages in her work as well, such as sculptures akin to her father in “Lovers in Tango” (2011). Sibande has often attributed her fascination with fashion and fabric as performance to a lifelong fascination with the “Sunday special clothes” community members wore to church.

 In visual arts, Sibande has referenced Juan Munoz and Yinka Shonibare as inspirations for stimulating solutions in her work. She has also listed the importance of growing up listening to Lauryn Hill.

 CURRENTLY

 Mary Sibande is represented by Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg, where photographs expanding on The Purple Shall Govern are on view. She has recently teamed up with Action Aid South African and the Young Urban Women Programme to raise funds and introduce art to young girls in low-income communities.

 Sibande recently unveiled a new sculpture entitled The Mechanism (an enormous study of the sewing needle) for the group exhibition “A Place in Time” at Nirox Foundation Sculpture Park in Johannesburg. Her work will appear in the group show Re[as]sisting Narratives at Framer Framded in Amsterdam, opening August 28th, 2016.

 Sibande has said that she wishes to expand the reach of her installations to include video work and theatre, as well as continuing in the tradition of fashion and garment-making. 

This biography was written by Artthrob in collaboration with SAHO.

MODUS OPERANDI

When Berni Searle was asked by the Brooklyn Museum of Art what her ‘Feminist Artist Statement’ was, she replied, “I don’t have a ‘feminist artist statement’ as such. Being a woman is only one aspect of who I am.”

This statement and wanting to not to be strictly ‘categorized or placed into a specific box is apparent in Searle’s work, the desire to belong, yet not to be reduced to simply, this or that, there are more layers within the complexity of the work. She is concerned with identity, but the complexities within that and that of belonging, through language, race, colour, gender and the History of South Africa. Searle also has a relationship with the land and rituals of the land, that is not always in reference to the land as a she or she within the place, whether is be stomping on mountains of grape skins (Night Fall, 2006), or walking through volcanic ash and soil (Seeking Refuge, 2008).

In Artthrob’s 2000 Modus Operandi, it states:
Using her own body as subject and point of departure, Searle experiments with the surface of her skin, allowing it to be clad in layers of coloured and aromatic spices, leaving her bodily imprint on drifts of spices on the floor, or staining certain areas of her body with various substances, suggesting trauma, or damage. The spices are in part a reference to the spice trade which brought white colonists to the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century, and in interbreeding with the local inhabitants and slaves brought from other parts of Africa, produced children of mixed race, or 'Coloured'. Searle's work confronts head-on this history and the obsession with racial classification which ensued.

BIOGRAPHY

Berni Searle was born in 1964 in Cape Town.  She received her Master of Art in Fine Art (MFA) from the University of Cape Town (1992-95). She was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art (BAFA) from the same institution (1984-7). She originally worked as a sculptor, and for her Masters degree produced a worked titled Illusions of Identity Notions of Nationhood, which according to a conversation with the artist and Kathryn Smith in 2000, “dealt with issues around nationalisms and nationhood in the face of a rapidly transforming culture. It laid the foundations for her explorations into an 'unfixed' conception of 'identity', and the creation of ambiguous spaces in which to consider these issues.”

Later Searle made the move to utilise large scale digital photographic prints and found materials to make installations. She uses time based media, like photography, video and film as a tool to capture her working with performative narratives and the self as the figure to embody history, land-memory and place. South African History is one aspect, awareness of her own colour and of those around her, as she worked on a series of works Colour Me series which was made in 1998. Her work was included in the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, the 1998 Cairo Biennale, and the 2001 and 2005 Venice Biennales. Searle received a UNESCO award in 1998, the Minister of Culture prize at the Dak’art 2000 Biennale, and was nominated for the FNB VITA Art Award 2000 as well as the Daimler-Chrysler Award for South African Contemporary Art in 2000. In 2001, she was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. She was the Standard Bank Young Artist in 2003 and shortlisted for the first Artes Mundi award in 2004.

Searle had four solo exhibitions at the Stevenson Gallery between 2004 and 2008. From 2006 – 2007 her solo exhibition Approach travelled to Krannert Museum, Champaign, Illinois, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, SA and the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida, USA.

In 2014 Searle was a part of two major exhibitions in the USA, Earth Matters at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, and Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa at the Yerba Buena Center with the Arts in conjunction with SFMOMA in San Francisco.

SOURCES

Her work embodies not only her physical self but the physicality of the landscape and the memory that it holds. Using the body and with performances is a post modern tradition that started with artists like, Cuban born, Ana Mendieta. Unlike Mendieta who creates often traces of violent scenes, Searle, uses the memory of the land to become part of her body. Mendieta the woman is displaced from her home and land where as the Nation that Searle has grown up with, has made her feel displaced within it and without actually leaving it. Berni Searle does not take the viewer to a monument or a place that one can completely recognize. The specificity of the location is often too surreal to be pinpointed. The landscapes show no traces of human life except for her presence. The colour, the coating, the hiding, emerging and covering, as well as the mountain, the ocean and the air show the desire to stay in that her body gives the gesture and posture of that which could be interpreted as a rooting or connecting to that place.

CURRENTLY

Berni Searle was the recipient of the Mbokodo Award in the Visual Arts category winner in 2015. The award is a National South African competition, celebrating women in the arts. Also in 2015, Searle was a participating artist in Between Democracies 1989-2014: Commemoration and Memory at Constitution Hill, in Johannesburg and The film will always be you at the Tate Modern in London, UK.

The exhibition, Senses of Time: Video and Film-based works of Africa will travel to:  Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, NY, 10 September – 11 December 2016, Smithsonian National Museum of Art. Washington DC. 25 May 2016- 2017 and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (LACMA). 20 December 2015- January 2017.

Berni Searle lives and works in Cape Town and is currently Associate Professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.

This biography was written by SAHO in collaboration with Artthrob

MODUS OPERANDI

Jo Ractliffe is a documentary photographer who captures the traces of violence, displacement and struggle in a landscape. The images evoke memory and history and the untold stories of the aftermath of conflict. Her work engages with the remnants and vestiges visible as scars in the landscape.

Ractliffe uses a wide range of photographic and art practices, including snapshot, documentary, forensic and studio photography, as well as installation video and projections. However her main chosen medium is the analog black and white image which captures a reality bordering on the mysterious which the artist emphasizes in her printing techniques.

BIOGRAPHY

Ractliffe was born in 1961 in Cape Town and she completed her BAFA and MFA degrees at the University of Cape Town. 

Photographic and art education has been a priority for Ractliffe and she has lectured as well as conducted workshops at private and public institutions throughout South Africa and abroad including the Salzburg Summer Academy in Austria. She has been known to collaborate with many other artists on building educational platforms including Rory Bester on PhotoFocus. She explores photography education across disciplines, histories, spaces and experiences. She is also a teacher at the Market Photo Workshop and serves on the advisory board.

Ractliffe was one of the founding members and curator of the Joubert Park Project, a socially directed public art initiative located in the inner city of Johannesburg (2000/01). This was followed by Johannesburg Circa Now, a collaboration with fellow artist, Terry Kurgan, at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in July 2004.

In 2015 Ractliffe’s was one of the selected few to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Aftermath of Conflict: Jo Ractliffe's photographs of Angola and South Africa, which featured the series Terreno Ocupado (2007).

Other solo exhibitions of note are:  Walther Collection Project Space, New York (2011); Fotohof, Salzburg (2012); and Museet for Fotokunst, Odense (2013); and The Borderlands (2013). After War at Foundation A Stichting, Brussels (2015), and Someone Else's Country at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, (2014).

Group exhibitions include; After Eden / Après Eden - The Walther Collection at La Maison Rouge, Paris (2015); Conflict, Time, Photography at the Tate Modern, London (2015); Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); Apartheid and After at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2014); Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, Walther Collection, Ulm (2013); Making History at Museum Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2012); Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life at the International Centre of Photography, New York (2012); New Topography of War at Le Bal, Paris (2011); Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at the V&A Museum, London (2011); Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, The Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Southern Germany (2010); the 7th Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2008); Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Centre for Photography, New York, and other venues (2006-8), and The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society, 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art (Biacs 2), Seville (2006).

In 2010 she was awarded a Writing Fellowship at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER). In 2011 she was nominated for the Discovery Prize at the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival, and As Terras do Fim do Mundo was nominated as best photobook of 2010 at the International Photobook Festival in Kassel (2011).

SOURCES

Three of Ractliffe’s major series of work focus on the Angolan Civil War and the relationship with South Africa. The first series titled Terreno Ocupado (2007–8), was made while Ractliffe's first visited Angola's capital, Luanda. The images captured were made five years after the end of the Civil War. The black and white photographs emphasize the structural fragility of the capital’s poorer areas as well as the marks on a place which has been fought over, occupied and even left.

The Angolan Civil War which lasted twenty seven years (1975 – 2002) and the independence movement was spear-headed by three vastly different organisations that turned on each other after Portugal exited the country. Differing political and economic ideologies as well as being resource rich meant ensured that each of which had a Cold War patron.

For the series As Terras do Fim do Mundo (2009–10), Ractliffe spent time with ex-soldiers while they traveled to the desolate places they had fought in the Angolan countryside. The images reflect the desolation, hiding and subtle re-growth into the mass areas of space.

South Africa played a major role in the Angolan Civil War and from 1978 to 1984 South African soldiers fought against the Angolans. The warfare between People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) also escalated into a full blown war between South Africa and Angola, which took place in 1981. An estimated 10 000 guerrillas lost their lives and South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) was reduced to carrying out terrorist attacks. In Ractliffe’s series The Borderlands (2011–13) she examines the impact of the wars in Angola inside of South Africa's borders, as well as photographing the landscapes militarized and had been taken over by the South African army. 

CURRENTLY

Jo Ractliffe and Penny Siopis are both participating artists in the Taipei Biennial 2016, 10 September 2016 - 5 February 2017. The theme of the biennial, curated by Corinne Diserens, is 'Gestures and archives of the present, genealogies of the future: A new lexicon for the biennial'. Ractliffe is a senior professor at Wits School of Arts and currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town.

Born in 1955 and based most of his life in Cape Town, Emile Maurice was an artist, curator, author educator and Nation builder. He received an Advanced Diploma in Fine Art, Michaelis School of Art, University of Cape Town in 1977 and then went to the USA where he obtained his MA graduate degree in art history (Syracuse University, NY), in 1981. In 1995 Maurice was appointed Head of Education at the South African National Gallery (SANG). Emile left SANG in 2000 to take up a position with Heritage Agency where he worked on numerous projects including an exhibition for the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island, the Alexandra Renewal Project, and the management of the Constitutional Court art collection. Most recently he was Convening the Factory of Arts at UWC's Centre for Humanities Research.

Maurice's work within arts, history and heritage almost always had a social aspect, investigating poverty, peace building and communal space. His primary research interest pertained to the re-writing of South African cultural history with a view to greater equity and representation in the context of colonial and apartheid marginalisation.

Randolph Hartzenberg is a Cape Town-based artist who works with painting, printmaking, installation, video and performance.

Through his paintings, installations and performances, Hartzenberg produces works that are as emphatic in their physicality as they are cerebral in content.

Hartzenberg was originally trained as an art teacher, with a Certificate Art Teaching from Hewat Training College in 1966 and a Higher Diploma Drama in Education from the University of Cape Town in 1989, educating has been a huge part of his professional life. He taught art at Alexander Sinton High School in Athlone and later lectured in design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology for several years.

In 1989 he completed a Bachelors of Fine Arts, and in 1994 a Masters in Fine Art, both at the University of Cape Town.

According to Mario Pissarra he describes Hartzenberg’s earlier work, the Domestic Baggage series, the demonstration of his interest in commonplace, everyday objects, which are often imbued with hints of their metaphorical potential. Pissarra further explains that the function of a box as a place to store things of value comes into play, the container that elucidates the nature of power as defined by access to and control of resources. This is not only with objects but to the human and who in the society is able to ‘get these things.’ Who has the resources to access the capitalist society? The box is also an association or analogy for being put into one as a human, a category, race or class. We are put in boxes. In this light there is a critique of ‘dominant taxonomies’, which are seemingly all powerful and imbedded with a sense of secuirty for those who embrace them, however in reality and especially in the context of South Africa, most people are excluded.

Hartzenberg has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1968, as well being published in numerous catalogues and books More recently in 2012 he produced the site-specific performance ‘Three Days’ for the Making Way exhibition at Fort Selwyn in Grahamstown. He discussed this work in a public lecture at the Arts Lounge organized by the ViPAA team as part of the National Arts Festival. In the 2013 version of Making Way at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg, his photographic and video work was featured alongside other notable contemporary South African artists.

Randolph Hartzenberg takes each project, regardless of the medium with a new point of departure and carefully considers the possibilities of the concept and the materiality and the form the work should take.  Often the solution is quite demanding, however he aims at satisfying himself and the viewer on many levels.

I hope that the work acts as a catalyst for questioning by the viewer, and for further engagement with the material, with the object, with the reasons for the object existing, with the processes that initiated the concept and also those involved in the making of the pieces. - Randolph Hartzenberg

Randolph Hartzenberg, "Three Days" Performance, National Arts Festival, 2012 from Ruth Simbao on Vimeo.

Commissions

2003: Breadline/Waterline, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
2000: Breadline/Waterline, Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa.
1995: Commissioned participation in Malcolm Payne’s installation for the Venice Biennale, Italy.

Collections

South African National Gallery, Cape Town; The Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town; The University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg; Vodacom, Cape Town; The Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA; and Norad, Oslo, Norway.

Solo Exhibitions
2008: Prints, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town.
1996: Map of the Neighbourhood, Metropolitan Life Gallery, Cape Town.
1994: Domestic Baggage, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, Cape Town.

Group shows
2013:  Making Way, Curated by Ruth Simbao, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg
2012:  Making Way, Curated by Ruth Simbao, Grahamstown Art Festival
2009: Dada South, IZIKO South African National Gallery, Cape Town.
2007: africa south, Curated by Mario Pissarra, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town.
2007: ReCenter, Curated by Mario Pissarra, Look-out Hill, Khayelitsha, Cape Town.
2006: Facing the Past: Seeking the Future — Reflections on a Decade of Truth and Reconciliations Commission, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town.
2006: Amajita in Conversation, Curated by Thembinkosi Goniwe, Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town.
2005: Botaki 3, Curated by Mario Pissarra, Old Mutual Asset Managers, Pinelands, Cape Town.
2004: Botaki, Curated by Mario Pissarra, Old Mutual Asset Managers, Pinelands, Cape Town
2003: Kwere Kwere: Journeys into Strangeness, Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
2002: Outdoor Sculpture Biennial, Spier, Stellenbosch.
2001: Telling Tales, 3rd I Gallery, Cape Town.
2001: Homeport, V & A Waterfront, Cape Town.
2000: Kwere Kwere: Journeys into Strangeness, Curated by Rory Bester, Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town.
1999: Staking Claims, Curated by Emma Bedford, The Granary, Cape Town
1999: Dialogue, Arhus, Denmark.
1998: !Xoe Site Specific, Nieu Bethesda.
1998: 30 Minutes, Robben Island Prison Complex, Robben Island.
1997: Hong Kong, etc., Curated by Hou Hanru, Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg.
1997: District Six Sculpture Project, Cape Town.
1997: Cyst: Works in Paint, Curated by Claire Menck, Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town and Sandton Civic Gallery, Johannesburg.
1996: Hardground Printmakers in collaboration with Stellenbosch University Gallery curated by Jonathan Comerford
1996: Faultlines, Curated by Jane Taylor, Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town.
1995: Transitions, Bath Festival, UK and Belfast, Northern Ireland.
1995: Siyawela: Love, Loss and Liberation in South African Art, Curated by Colin Richards, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, UK.
1995: Venice Biennale (participant in work by Malcolm Payne), Venice, Italy.
1994: Displacements, Curated by Jane Taylor and David Bunn, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA.
1978-1979: Response To The Detentions, Curated by Dimitri Nicholas-Fanourakis, Space Theatre Gallery Bloem Street, Cape Town
1968: Artcom, Argus Gallery, St Georges Street, Cape Town

Ari Sitas (b.1952) is a creative socialist thinker, an activist and one of the key intellectuals of the post 1980s generation in South Africa. 

He is a professor and the head of the Sociology Department at UCT, a post he took over in 2009. He also chairs the board of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, an institution that was promulgated after his and Sarah Mosoetsa's pioneering work in creating a Charter for the fields of study in 2011.     

Besides a remarkable academic career he has been a distinguished poet, writer and dramatist. His selected poems have just been published by Deep South under the title "Rough Music". His audacious, "Around the World in 80 Days-the India Section" is about to be published by UNISA Press. His poems have been translated into Zulu, French, German, Greek, Turkish, Urdu and Hindi and many have been set to music.

Before his appointment as a professor at UCT he had spent 27 years in Durban where he, his colleagues and collaborators were key to the anti-apartheid and transformation processes which have shifted society from an authoritarian colonial enclave into a democratic and radical space. Such work in cultural, community, cooperative and workplace contexts still resonates as a cultural renaissance. So has the work he and others put in place to move the province from conflict to civility.

Sitas grew up in colonial Cyprus during the island's independence struggles and bi-communal strife and matured, in Johannesburg where he received his undergraduate and post-graduate education at Wits. He received his PhD in 1984 under the supervision of Eddie and David Webster.

Any e-search has his name well-correlated with the founding of the workers' and people's theatre movements, FOSATU, COSATU, COSAW, Natal Culture Congress, Culture and Working Life Projject, Youth Unemployment Projects, the RDP, ANC, KZN Economic Council, Chris Hani Institute, African Renaissance Development Trust and a plethora of academic leadership positions.

He is increasingly seen as a significant "southern theorist" and works actively with African, Latin American and Asian networks to establish in his own words a new knowledge commons which is sensitive to all nodal points of this shrinking planet. He is also a South African representative on the BRICS Think Tanks Council.   

Ngobese was born in 1960 in KwaMashu but he later moved to Cator Manor Township outside Durban in KwaZulu Natal. He attended the Dumani Lower Primary School and later continued his studies through the Intec Correspondence College.  After completing his schooling, he attended the Khanya Theological Institute Union Correspondence College.He started painting at the age of seven and his mother continually encouraged the young boy saying it was a family talent, his mother’s brother having been Arthur Buthelezi, one of the earlier generation of African artists along with Gerard Bhengu and the Ntuli brothers. Khehla works in watercolours, pastels and pen and ink.  He is a full time artist and has worked on a number of mural paintings in the city of Durban, including the Durban Station (Greyhound Bus Rank), Durban Central Prison, Lawyers for Human Rights, Umlazi Station and I-Care children’s shelter. 

Tracy Payne’s hyper real paintings evoke a sense of sublime sexuality in the art of constraint, even if she is painting a flower.

She was born in 1965 in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1987, she graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, with a Bachelors of Fine Art.

Upon completing her degree, Payne spent a few years working and travelling thoughtout Europe and England. Exploring new cultures to Payne and in 2002 she traveled to Tokyo for the spring experience and to capture sakura, the cherry blossoms. She documented the experience, on film. She also found inspiration in the myriad images of kinbaku, erotic rope bondage. 

In her early career she was also involved in teaching art part time. However, her career has not been limited to art but has taken on many facets, including creating her own fashion label, working as an illustrator, set designer and scenic artist, as well as undertaking both private and corporate painting commission.
According to Payne’s inspiration diary she explains, “This tension between holding back and letting go, restraint and exploration, encapsulates her concerns as an artist and is investigated further in her next body of work entitled Sacred Yin (2005). In these hexagonal paintings the ropes are cast off and flowers are morphed into patterns reminiscent of mandalas, embodying a sense of spiritual equanimity. Eastern spirituality has been a consistent thread through Payne's work since 2002 as well as her focus on the feminine principle. Around 2006 she shifts her attention to the masculine as her muse.”

Payne is currently working as a full time artist and part-time painting teacher. She is based in Woodstock, Cape Town.

Solo Exhibitions
'Fumbling Towards Ecstasy', Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, 2013
'Muse', Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, 2011
'Awaken', Kizo Gallery, Durban, 2008
'Sacred Yang', Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 2007
'Sacred Yin', Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 2005
'Post Tokyo', Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, 2004
'Flashback', Joao Ferreira Gallery, Cape Town, 2001
'Hush hush ....a love story', 73 Rose Str. Bo-Kaap, Cape Town, 1998

Group Exhibitions (Selected)
'Breath Water Sound' Ongaro, Cape Town, 2016
'Lineage' Ongaro, Cape Town, 2016
'Of Monuments and Men', Imibala Gallery, Somerset West, 2016
'Drawing the Line' Art.b Gallery, Cape Town, 2015
'Seeking Eden' Casa Labia Gallery, Cape Town, 2014
'Dinner Collection' Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, 2014
'What Lies Beneath' Equus Gallery, Cavalli Estate, 2014
'Naak' Art.b Gallery, Cape Town, 2014
'Paint Matters' Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, 2014
'Dinner Collection' Barnard Gallery, Newlands, CT, 2013
'Changing Faces: Profiling Portraits in South African Art', Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, 2013
'Dinner Collection', Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, 2012
'Summer Show', Casa Labia, Cape Town, 2012
'Cacophony Collection', Barnard Gallery, Cape Town, 2012
'Michaelis Alumni Exhibition and Auction', Michaelis Gallery, UCT, Cape Town, 2011
'Terpentyn' Artscape, Cape Town, 2011
'Casa Labia in Bloom', Natale Labia Museum, Cape Town, Nov 2010 - Jan 2011
'Heems', Kruisrivier farm, Klein Karoo, 2010
'Summer 2009/10: Projects', Michael Stevenson, Cape Town, 2009
'Let Them Eat Cake', Die Dorpstraat Galery, Stellenbosch, 2009 
'Harbour: The Expression of Containment in Contemporary South African Art', KZNSA Gallery, Durban, 2009
'Self/Not-Self', Brodie/Stevenson, Johannesburg, 2009
'Summer 2007/8', Michael Stevenson, CT, 2007
'South African Art Now', Michael Stevenson, CT, 2006
"Second To None: Women - South African Icons", Iziko South African National Gallery, 2006
'New Painting', KZNSA Gallery, Durban, UNISA Art Gallery, Pretoria, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2006
'South African Art 1850 - Now', Michael Stevenson, CT, 2004
'Poynton, Victor and Payne', Michael Stevenson, CT, 2004
'Winter Warmers', Joao Ferreira Gallery, CT, 2003
'Ydesire', Castle of Good Hope, CT, 2003
'Emergency', Bell-Roberts Gallery, CT, 2000
'Sacred Symbols: Inner Vision', 3rd I Gallery, CT, 1999
'Angels Blue', Bang! The Gallery, CT, 1999
'Deposits, Idasa Gallery, CT, 1998 
'Bloom', Area Gallery, CT, 1998 
'Scrawl', Mau Mau Gallery, CT, 1998 
'Unplugged 3', Rembrandt Van Rijn Gallery, Johannesburg, 1998
'Urban Objects of Desire', Mau Mau Gallery, CT, 1998
'Art Greetings', Hanel Gallery, CT, 1997
'Cognisance: Ingqwalsela: Herkenning', South African Association of Arts, CT, 1996
'Gay Rights Rewrites', Malcolm Melkhuis, CT, 1995
'Photoworks', South African Association of Arts, CT, 1994 
'Women on Men:Men on Woman', Seeff Trust Gallery, CT, 1994
"Volkskas Atelier", Everaard Reed Gallery, Johannesburg, 1994 
'Volkskas Atelier', Association of Arts, Pretoria, 1993
'Safe Sex', The Artsstrip, Association of Arts, CT, 1993
'Artstrip', opening exhibition at The Association of Arts, CT, 1992
'Introducing: Brice, Smith and Payne', Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, 1992
'Volkskas Atelier', Association of Arts, South Africa, 1992
'Drawings', Baxter Gallery, Cape Town, 1991
'Volkskas Atelier', Association of Arts, South Africa, 1991
The Art Market Gallery, Cape Town, 1990
Cornucopia Gallery, Cape Town, 1989
Hipnosis Gallery, Johannesburg, 1988

Wim Botha is a contemporary artist working mainly in the mediums of sculpture and installation. He was born in Pretoria in 1974 and grew up in a suburban town on the eastern side of Pretoria. In 1996 he graduated from the University of Pretoria with a BA (Visual Art) in 1996. Currently he lives in Cape Town and is represented by the Stevenson Gallery, South Africa where he has in 2016 his seventh solo exhibition. 

Botha throughout his career has received a number of prestigious awards, including the Helgaard Steyn Prize for sculpture in 2013, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2005, and the first Tollman Award in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place atGalerie Jette Rudolph in Berlin in 2015, the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (2014); Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013), and the Sasol Art Museum, Stellenbosch, as the Stellenbosch University Wordfest Artist for 2013.

He has exhibited globally and notable group exhibitions include The Divine Comedy: Heaven, purgatory and hell revisited by contemporary African artists at the MMK (Museum für Moderne Kunst), Frankfurt, Germany, travelling to other venues (2014-5);Lichtspiele at Museum Biedermann, Donaueschingen, Germany (2014); Imaginary Fact: South African Art and the Archive, the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); The Rainbow Nation, Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2012); the Göteborg Biennial, Sweden (2011); Memories of the Future: The Olbricht Collection, La Maison Rouge, Paris (2011); the 11th Triennale für Kleinplastik, Fellbach, Germany (2010); PEEKABOO: Current South Africa, Tennis Palace Art Museum, Helsinki (2010); Olvida Quien Soy - Erase me from who I am, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2006); the seventh edition of Dak'Art, the Dakar Biennale (2006); and the touring exhibition Africa Remix (2004-2007).

Wim Botha is most known for busts which he creates out of carved books and encyclopedias, however it is much more complex and developed than merely objects.  The work he creates is deconstructed figurative monuments and figures juxtaposed with light, movement and installation. The works are often dark and in states of battle or conflict, to be brief.

International award winning filmmaker Junaid Ahmed was born in Durban, Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) South Africa in 1959. He attended Southlands Secondary School in Chatsworth from 1972 to 1976. After completing a B.A. (Hon) degree in Drama from the then University of Durban-Westville (now UKZN), he began acting and producing both in South Africa’s previously disadvantaged community and in mainstream theatres.

Ahmed was the General Secretary of the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) from May 1986 to November 1990.

Over the years, Ahmed produced and directed numerous documentaries. Through his company Fineline Productions, he has produced and directed short films for Channel 4 and the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). He has also produced and directed a number of award-winning documentaries for the Discovery Channel, Arte (Europe), SABC and e-tv in South Africa.

Ahmed has also been the production manager on the feature, Gandhi, My Father, in India. His first feature as director, The Vow, was released in 1998, followed by More than just a Game in 2007.

His accolades include Best Sports Documentary at the Milan FICTS Festival for Iqakamba – Hard Ball and Lucky​ BAFTA nominated for Best Short Film and winner Best Short Film at over 40 international film festivals including the Oscar eligible festivals of Clermont Ferrand, Cinequest San Jose and Aspen Shortsfest.

His feature film More Than Just a Game, was acquired by Sony Pictures International (SPI) for world-wide distribution. Ahmed’s last feature film was Happiness Is A Four Letter Word which was released in South Africa in February 2016.

Junaid Ahmed passed away on 1 November 2016 in Durban KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Mannie Manim was born in July 1941, in Cape Town. With more than 50 years’ involvement in theatre, Manim has left indelible imprints in the arts and entertainment industry in South Africa and globally. His involvement in the arts industry began as an usher at the Brook Theatre in 1955, where he worked for five years, rising through the ranks to become company manager. He left to join Leonard Schach Productions.

He worked for two years as a technical director of the Civic Theatre in Johannesburg when it opened, then moved to Theatre International for some years, eventually joining the Performing Arts Company of the Transvaal (PACT) Drama Theatre in 1967, where he was the administrative head. 

In 1973, he left PACT to start a theatre production company, known simply as The Company, with Barney Simon and a group of actors. The Company was an independent outfit committed to non-racial theatre. Manim was a co-founder of the Market Theatre in 1976 and became the trend-setting theatre’s managing director. The Market Theatre was home to international playwrights who wanted to have their plays presented there because of the commitment to non-racialism and their opposition to segregation in both society and on stage.

As the work of the Market Theatre Company became known internationally, he was also the co-producer of various productions, visiting Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the United States of America and Japan, where he was the lighting designer on many of these tours. The Market Theatre Company achieved the feat of 33 international tours from its inception until 1991.

As managing director and producer of Mannie Manim Productions from 1991 he has been presenter, co-presenter, executive producer and lighting designer for many plays in various theatres locally and abroad.

Manim's association with Athol Fugard as lighting designer or producer started in 1970 with Boesman and Lena and People are Living There at the Alexander Theatre. Since then he has lit and produced all the first South African productions of Fugard's plays in South Africa.  He worked with the inimitable Fugard on his international tours to London, Toronto, Australia and Singapore. He also worked with Mbongeni Ngema in Mama as a co-producer and lighting designer for its Australian and New Zealand tour.

Among the many highlights of his career as a lighting designer are the Cape Town Opera’s Show Boat in Sweden; Noah of Cape Town and the acclaimed I Am My Own Wife and The Tempest at the Baxter Theatre Centre; the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and in five other cities in the United Kingdom; and Sheila’s Day and John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth at the Market Theatre.

He was also responsible for the lighting on The Magic Flute and A Christmas Carol at the Young Vic and in the West End; Sizwe Banzi is Dead at the National Theatre, London; Nothing but the Truth at the Hampstead Theatre, London, the Lincoln Centre in New York, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the National Theatre of Namibia in Windhoek; The Real Thing at the Strindberg Intima Theatre in Stockholm; Janet Suzman’s production of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon; and Porgy and Bess in Umea, Sweden.

Other productions he participated in include The Island at the National Theatre and the Old Vic in London, in Toronto, at the Kennedy Centre in Washington and at BAM in New York; Carmen and The Mysteries at Wilton’s Music Hall in London, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, at the International Theatre Festival in Perth, at the Queen’s Theatre in London and at the World Stage Festival in Toronto; and Sorrows and Rejoicings at the Tricycle Theatre in London.

Some of the awards which he received include the Shirley Moss Award (1980) for the Greatest Practical and Technical Contribution to Theatre in South Africa, the South African Institute of Theatre Technology Award for Outstanding Achievement as a Theatre Technician, Administrator and Lighting Designer, and the first Vita Award for the Most Enterprising Producer. He was 10-time winner of the Vita Best Original Lighting Award.

In 1990, he was made Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres by the French Government, and the following year he received a gold medal for Theatre Development from the South African Academy of Arts and Science. He was also awarded the 2001/02 Dora Mavor Moore Award for best Lighting Design in Toronto.

In 2004, he was awarded the Naledi Lifetime Achievement Award by the Theatre Managements of South Africa.

On 27 April 2011, the State President, Jacob G Zuma, conferred Mannie Manim with the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver for his excellent contribution to the development of South African theatre and in the field of creative arts in general.

Arthur Goldreich was born in Johannesburg in 1929. He grew up in Pietersberg in the Northern Transvaal (now Limpopo). 

One morning, his secondary school headmaster announced that students would be learning a foreign language, German. The implication was clear, many Afrikaners, including some of their political leaders, hoped and believed that Hitler would win the war. When Goldreich's teacher distributed the German "textbook", Goldreich a Jewish boy found himself staring at a Hitler Youth magazine. He balked and wrote to the Prime Minister, Jan Smuts, refusing to learn German and demanding to be taught Hebrew. Goldreich got his way.

Goldreich moved to Israel to fight in the Arab-Israeli war as part of an elite underground Jewish army.  During the 1940s he was a member of the Palmach, the military wing of the Jewish National Movement in Palestine.  He returned to South Africa in 1954 and won South Africa's Best Young Painter Award the following year for his figures in black and white. He created the sets for King Kong, a celebrated South African musical tracing the tragic story of a real-life boxer.

Goldreich and lawyer Harold Wolpe bought Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, Johannesburg, in 1961 as headquarters for the South African Communist Party which was forced underground by the apartheid state. Lilliesleaf Farm also became the secret headquarters of Umkonto We Sizwe (MK), where the underground leadership of the banned African National Congress (ANC) met secretly.   Goldreich and his family provided refuge at their home on Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, to Nelson Mandela and other freedom fighters in 1961. Mandela moved to the farm in October 1961, using the alias of a gardener named "David Motsamayi" to hide from the police.

During his speech from the dock on 20 April 1964 in the Rivonia Trial Mandela said: "Whilst staying at Liliesleaf farm, I frequently visited Arthur Goldreich in the main house and he also paid me visits in my room. We had numerous political discussions covering a variety of subjects. We discussed ideological and practical questions, the Congress Alliance ... Because of what I had got to know of Goldreich, I recommended on my return to South Africa that he should be recruited to Umkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the ANC."

As a member of the military arm of the ANC, Goldreich helped to locate sabotage sites for MK and draft a disciplinary code for its guerrillas.

Goldreich was arrested at the farm on 11 July 1963 in the now infamous Rivonia Raid.  On that day, the security police raided the farm and captured 19 members of the underground, charging them with sabotage.

Goldreich, along with Harold Wolpe, Mosie Moolla and Abdulhay Jassat escaped from custody at Marshall Square Police Station in Johannesburg on 11 August 1963, after bribing a young prison official.

Eventually he made his way to Swaziland disguised as a priest. His escape infuriated the prosecutors and police since Goldreich was considered to be "the arch-conspirator."

He moved to Israel in 1964 after his dramatic escape. He lived in Herzliya on Israel's Mediterranean coast. Goldreich became an architect in Israel and went on to found the architecture department at Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy where he also taught.

Goldreich briefly returned to South Africa after 1994 to attend a reunion at Liliesleaf. Today the farm has been restored into a museum detailing the events leading up to the Rivonia Raid.

Arthur Goldreich, passed away on Tuesday, 24 May 2011 in Tel Aviv, Israel, aged 82.   He is survived by his sons Nicholas, Paul, Amos and Eden.

Nico Carstens was a popular South African composer of accordion music. He got his first accordion at the age of 13 and won an adult music competition six months later. He composed his first music piece at the age of 17.

His music is variously classified as boeremusiek or jazz, and he made a name for himself as a hugely successful travelling musician, often spending vast periods of time on the road playing in small towns and villages as well as big cities. Carstens garnered a reputation for being a consummate professional where his music and performances were concerned, insisting that his band wore dress suits with a bow tie, frilly shirt, cummerbund and cufflinks, irrespective of the size or location of their venue. His most famous hit was the song Zambezi, which was covered by the likes of The Shadows, Dixie Aces, Bert Kaempfert, Sam Sklair, James Last, Chet Atkins and Eddie Calvert. At his height, Carstens was considered one of the top ten accordionists in the world.

Carstens was married six times and enjoyed spending the money he earned from performances on fine clothes and big cars.  However, having sold the rights to his music, he died penniless in a small room in Netcare N1 old age home in Cape Town in 2016, aged 90.

Gwigwi Mrwebi, also called ‘Bra Gwigwi’, whose birth name was Benni, was a well known alto saxophonist in the 1950’s South African Jazz scene. He taught himself to play the saxophone and the clarinet, and is said to have had a big showman personality as he was loved by many of his peers and followers. He became the first black South African to form and lead a full 14-piece band in the country. Mrwebi was a founding member of the Union of South African Artists, which was formed in 1953 in order to protect the rights of musicians and their royalties.

With all of his gigs and concerts, he was also working for the South African magazine Drum as a circulation manager. Part of his international acclaim is due to his numerous appearances for the BBC World Service Africa.

Mrwebi’s genre of music was often referred to as African jazz and township jive and he was a very important part of these South African music subcultures, so much so that his influences have lived on in the genre of mbaqanga and the jazz scene locally and internationally. It is this legacy that is echoed in the renaming of a Johannesburg city street after him. Newtown - the area in which the street was renamed from Pim street to Gwigwi Mrwebi - is known for its historical significance in the music and arts scene, as such pays homage to a number of legends including Mrwebi.

He was a member of a number of local and international bands, namely The Jazz Maniacs, The Harlem Swingsters, The Three Jazzolomos and  later The Jazz Dazzlers in the 1960s. The Jazz Dazzlers was previously known as the Shanty Town Sextet, it was later renamed after the inclusion of more musicians, including Mrwebi, Hugh Masekela and others. The group was well known for backing noteable artists and groups such as The Manhattans. The Jazz Dazzlers would be at the core of a South African musical titled King Kong: An African Jazz (1959) as the majority of the music was compiled and played by the ensemble.

King Kong played a very important role as it displayed the vibrant art, music and theater scene that was popular among the youth in the township in apartheid South Africa. It was written specifically to speak to and about the realities facing young black south africans whilst highlighting the life of young boxer Ezekeal Dhlamini “King Kong.” Mrwrebi was part of the ensemble and played the clarinet in the play.

Mrwebi received a scholarship grant to study at the Berklee College of music in Boston, USA. The scholarship was awarded by CHISA records, a record company founded in 1966 by Stewart Levine and Hugh Masekela. The company was based in Los Angeles and was formed to give an international platform for african and south african musicians.

Mrwebi will forever be remembered for his legendary musical achievements and his influences will continue to live on in the jazz world.

Adam Glasser was born on the 20th September, 1955 in Cambridge, England, then later moved to Johannesburg, South Africa with his family where he spent his childhood and teen years. Being the son of South African composer and music director Stanley ‘Spike’ Glasser, his father influenced him musically, handing him his first harmonica at the age of 17.  Adam however, would only learn to play the harmonica 10 years later and instead became a pianist that occasionally played at small time gigs and cruise chips.

Adam returned to England in the 70’s to study and graduated with a BA (Hons) in European Literature, and afterwards decided to move to Paris to pursue and study jazz piano. After only completing one semester at Berklee College in 1981, he moved back to London and freelanced playing gigs at hotels, events and restaurants while developing his skills as a jazz pianist and forming a trio and a quartet. The 80’s was very successful for Adam’s career where he worked with South African alto player Dudu Pukwane and his composition “August One” featured on his album “Zila ‘86’”, and performed at numerous festivals across Spain, Italy and Belgium. While on one of his gigs on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, he asked for lessons from a harmonica player he had met, from there his interest was sparked to learn how to master the instrument. He was also influenced by Burt Bacharach, a musician who played the harmonica on a Stevie Wonder album he had listened to. He became self-taught as he played both instruments simultaneously trying to acquire a unique sound to incorporate in his jazz music – a skill he continued to use even on stage.

Across the 90’s he toured the UK with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Jimmy Witherspoon, as well as winning the Peter Whittingham Award in 1996. During this time he advanced his compositional skills and recorded his first album ‘The Adam Glasser Quartet Live at the Space Theatre in 1997, which remained unreleased. Concurrently, in 1990 he became the lead pianist and musical director of already acclaimed South African vocal group ‘The Manhattan Brothers’ for the following 16 years. During this time, Adam progressively focused on the chromatic harmonica, enhancing his skill and specialization which presented the opportunity to perform and record with key film composers and pop stars.

Adam felt strongly about producing an album that would document material from the last moments of The Manhattan Brothers active stages as performers in 2004, which featured compositions by the leader Joe Mogotsi. This journey resulted in “Inyembezi” which was released in 2006 by EMI South Africa.

Although Adam made waves musically, he only recorded his first debut album in 2009, Free at First, which won him the SAMA for best contemporary album. This created an aspiration to work with local artists, and not long after winning, he worked with numerous South African artists to record Mzansi which was released in 2011.

Having made notable success with an instrument that falls under the less prominent of jazz instruments, Adam brings a unique South African style to the harmonica as he incorporates it in his music.

Overview

• Received his first harmonica at the age of 17.
• Holds a BA (Hons) in European Literature.
• Became the musical director and pianist of South African vocal group The Manhattan Brothers in 1990.
• The Manhattan Brothers appeared and performed at the Wembley Concert in celebrating the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.
• Toured with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in 1991.
• Toured with Jimmy Whiterspoon in 1993.
• Recorded his first unreleased album in 1997 which featured multi-instrumentalist Elliot Ngubane and vocalist Pinise Saul.
• Adam shared harmonica credits with Toots Thielemans in the films “Hard Rain” in 1997, “The Good Theif in 2002 and the West End production of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” which featured Val Kilmer and British composer Django Bates.
• Won the Peter Whittingham Award in 1996.
• The Manhattan Brothers performed in collaboration with the Syndicate in Vienna in 1998.
• Adam filled in for Stevie Wonder on a live TV show alongside Sting promoting the “Brand New Day” album and appeared with Eurythmics in 1999.
• Adam performed as a guest with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall.
• Adam's harmonica features on albums with artists such as long time Sting guitarist Dominic Miller ("Second Nature" & "Fourth Wall"), Brazilian vocal legend ZiziPossi ("Bossa"), Australian fusion virtuoso Carl Orr ("Absolute Freedom" feat. Billy Cobham) and Zero 7 ("When It Falls").
• Adam played the harmonica in London in theatre productions such as “Midsummer Night’s Dream” Shakespeare’s Globe in 2002; “Scenes from the Big Picture”, and “His Girl Friday” at the Royal National Theatre in 2005.