Play is both a method and a philosophy. It is an open-ended gesture, an unguarded response to a world that demands rigid structure and certainty. The 2025 Investec Cape Town Art Fair embraced this ethos, centering its curatorial framework on PLAY. Through this theme, the fair staged a series of congruent conversations on beauty, levity, and the radical possibilities embedded in play as a way of knowing and world-making.
In African traditions, play is foundational: in storytelling, in music, in the way movement and repetition shape ritual. The Investec Cape Town Art Fair continued in this lineage, offering a terrain where play was not just conceptual but tactile. This was made visible in dynamic forms, participatory installations, and a chromatic excess that invited joy. Play manifested as both material exploration and conceptual strategy, weaving itself through textile works, chromatic interventions, and participatory installations. In the rhythmic process of stitching and layering, in the transformation of discarded materials into bold new forms, play became a method of both reinvention and critique. The psychology of color heightened this presence, with vibrant hues disrupting traditional exhibition spaces.
One of the fair’s most compelling embodiments of this ethos was the Exhibition Match: Trophy Cabinet, an installation that brought together artists working at the intersection of sport, competition, and display culture. By reimagining the trophy case, a symbol of achievement, hierarchy, and historical inscription the project disrupted the idea of success as a fixed, linear pursuit. Instead, it proposed play as an evolving and collective process, where meaning is not merely awarded but continuously shaped by those who engage in it. The Trophy Cabinet installation, featuring Dr. Willie Bester’s Trojan Horse, leaned into play’s performative and political dimensions. Bester’s assemblage constructed from found objects, metal scraps, and industrial detritus evoked the deceptive grandeur of victory, forcing viewers to interrogate what is truly won in the games of history and power.
Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than in the Tomorrows/Today section, a space dedicated to emerging artists who are actively negotiating the artistic language of our time. Curated by Dr. Mariella Franzoni, the selection captured the exuberance and criticality of play in its various manifestations. These artists, many of them young and working across media, used play as both medium and message, wielding color, form, and movement to open up new aesthetic and ideological possibilities.
For all its lightness, play is never just frivolous. It is a way of testing boundaries, negotiating space, and reclaiming agency. This was evident in the work of Barcelona-based Cameroonian artist Agnes Essonti Luque, who received the Tomorrows/Today Prize. Her practice, an elegant entanglement of movement, material, and meaning, captured the spirit of the fair, where play functioned not as escapism but as an intervention, one that disrupted the inaccessibility often associated with more dense themes, making complex narratives more tactile, felt, and open to engagement.
In the end, PLAY was not just a theme, it was a provocation. It asked how play can be mobilized as a generative force, how it can be both form and function, both act and aftermath. In a world that often demands that we take things seriously, the fair reminded us that play is, in fact, a serious business. And perhaps, it is precisely in that tension between levity and gravity, between pleasure and purpose, that the most urgent artistic expressions emerge.