At The Edge of The Image: Contemporary Practices from South Africa

“It is impossible to speak of Africa. It is impossible to speak of Africa in conventional terms of the art world or the Academy. Because Africa, since the dawn of times is fantasy. A fantastic vessel within which everyone deposits his or her own neuroses, angst, fear, or anger. How then may we tell the tale of this contradictory space, how can we speak of its history and geography without re-examining its past and questioning what we thought we understood? It’s crucial to unlearn Africa. To rebuild it with new tools. And these tools depend upon contemporaneity.” — Simon Njami

Ayanda Mabulu is a South African painter whose work has consistently engaged the unresolved tensions of post-apartheid society. Emerging with a practice shaped by political urgency, he has positioned painting as a site of confrontation rather than reconciliation.

His paintings operate at the intersection of satire, rage, and historical reckoning. Drawing on the visual language of political cartoons, mass media, and propaganda, Mabulu exposes the lingering architectures of colonialism, capitalism, and racial power, often implicating both global systems and local elites. Reverence and irreverence collapse within a single pictorial space, where exaggeration and distortion function as tools to destabilise the visual hierarchies that sustain authority. Mabulu’s practice insists on painting’s continued relevance as a volatile and effective instrument of political inquiry.

The body in Strydom’s work appears suspended between action and introspection, visibility and withdrawal. Through repetition and seriality, he resists resolution, presenting physical movement as a form of inquiry rather than spectacle. His work proposes the body as a site of continuous negotiation between control and release, intimacy and display, self-possession and exposure.

Employing restrained formal strategies, Blomkamp creates contemplative environments that reward sustained attention. His focus is less on representation than on perception, how time is experienced, how memory accumulates, and how meaning emerges through subtle shifts in tone, surface, and rhythm. Abstraction functions here as a reflective act, resisting spectacle in favour of resonance.