Venus vs Modernity

Culture Reporter Culture 2019-09-10 06:28:29

At the peak of her fame in the early 1800s, Saartjie Baartman became a reference point for abolishionists, fashion designers, and political satirists alike. Her remains were dissected and put on display at the French National Museum for 150 years, and in 2002, Saartjie Baartman was finally returned to the land of her birth, the Gamtoos River Valley in the Eastern Cape.

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Objects of Desire, Addendum

Culture Reporter Culture 2019-09-05 18:02:13

Objects of Desire, Addendum exists as a postscript to Mokgosi’s acclaimed, long-standing visual essay, Democratic Intuition, of which Comrades, exhibited at Stevenson, Cape Town, in 2016, was the second of eight chapters. Comprising painting and sculpture, Democratic Intuition questioned how one can approach the conceptual promises of democracy in relation to the daily lived experiences of the subjects that occupy southern Africa.

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Number One Soweto Boy

Culture Reporter Culture 2019-09-04 03:12:27

Multi award-winning musician Samthing Soweto has become the first local artist to have simultaneous #1 releases on both the Apple Music Singles and Album Charts in South Africa with a Pre-Add release. His latest single Akulaleki (featuring Shasha, DJ Maphorisa & Kabza De Small) is currently topping the singles chart with his forthcoming album topping the Album chart.

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Sibusile Xaba Live

Culture Reporter Culture 2019-09-02 02:58:23

With a vocal style that is part dreamscaping and part ancestral invocation, Sibusile Xaba divines as opposed to plainly singing. Combined with a guitar style that is rooted in expressive picking, Xaba's music shatters the confines of genre, taking only the fundamentals from mentors such as Madala Kunene and Dr Philip Tabane and imbuing these with a mythology and improvisational intensity all of his own.

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Post-Age

Culture Reporter Culture 2019-08-30 04:24:49

Postage stamps have been in circulation since the eighteenth century; more than 200 years later they are still sold but aren’t used as much as they were and are now more of a collection/collector’s item because of the historical value that stamps carry.

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Umgidi ENSEMBLE

Culture Reporter Culture 2019-08-27 03:31:37

Umgidi Ensemble was Ndabo Zulu's recent master's project at the Norwegian music Academy; this project aims at looking at what could be a possible orchestration of a Nguni orchestra. Like in a western symphony orchestra which comprises of instruments that have a huge traditional significance to the west, the ensemble aims at assembling both conventional and Nguni traditional instruments that will complement the compositional content.

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Ekasi Lam – An Ode to Kwaito, Un-owed to Kwaito

Culture Reporter Culture 2019-08-26 03:41:59

Kwaito music is inescapable in this Mzansi. It is ours. A creation that was and continues to be authored by the Black Lived Experience, and it engages Black Life. In Kwaito, we have a national treasure. A monument to the Township, and to Black Life.

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Patrick Bongoy reinvents the wheel in Matter

Culture Reporter Culture 2019-08-21 04:10:23

Matter draws out the history of rubber as a precious natural resource and its relationship to the colonial past of the DRC and its afterlives. The works reflect on the violent exploitation of labourers who harvest the material, as well as environmental damage that has occurred as a result.

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