For over 30 years, Detroit musicians Tbone Paxton and RJ Spangler have been exploring the beauty of South African jazz in their various, award-winning projects.

As a response to the fatigue of everyday mass media statistics about both the infections and mortality rates, conspiracy theories pertaining vaccines, spats regarding the origins of this pandemic and the discomfort caused by global lockdown regulations; Musa Nxumalo curates this exhibition with an intension to bring to the fore the ideas that are explored by contemporary visual artists who are actively exploring ideas and producing work during this complex moment of our lifetime.

The campaign supports talent by providing funding, production and mentorship for creative individuals or collectives to make their ideas come to life. From 20 July until 13 August, Johannesburg based creatives can apply for a one-week residency this autumn.

Bantu Biko, the Founding Father of the Black Consciousness Movement, warned us that apartheid employed a Divide & Rule strategy where the sections of the black community would be placed in separate concentration camps and oppressed in “varying degrees”.

Squint your eyelids even tighter and you’re bound to hear the last remaining echo of the neighbourhood gossip: whose son, just yesterday a tottering tot, has gone rouge and robbed the Somali’s spaza shop, which spinster is shacking up with whose philandering husband, whose daughter was spotted disembarking a Nigerian mogul’s car and who owes the mashonisa for the weave his girlfriend is busy posting selfies in, while their two children go hungry in some drought-ridden village the couple only visit on Christmas!

The starting point of the analysis is that the architects, agents and beneficiaries of racial-capitalism have so much to gain from the maintenance of the apartheid economy and apartheid geography and so much to lose from the dismantling of racial-capitalism and the rolling back of the legacies and continuities of colonialism that they cannot risk even the slightest possibility of a revolutionary turn to the left in South Africa – whether initiated by the ruling African comprador bourgeoise or imposed on them by pressure from below.

A highlight for collectors is the creative response of photographers to the Covid 19 pandemic. This includes dramatic portraits by Lamyne M from the Ivory Coast, theatrical imagery by Jabulani Dlamini and Marc Shoul’s social documentary interventions.

How I wish I could have made my first contribution to an international publication under different circumstances, not the one we are currently experiencing. Since yesterday I have been trying to come up with words to describe this hell we are living under to someone outside our country, so that they may see this mess vividly.