The Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) launched its new exhibition programme last week, which runs for the rest of the year. Otherscapes features installations by four contemporary South African artists: Siemon Allen, Wim Botha, Nicholas Hlobo and Sethembile Msezane.
JCAF is a singular art institution in the current South African contemporary art landscape. Defiantly non-commercial and self-sustaining, it has been responsible since its opening for a range of important and intellectually thorough and challenging shows. Memorably, the foundation has exhibited work by renowned contemporary feminist installation artist Ana Mendieta and showed the first work in SA by Frida Kahlo as part of a cycle of exhibitions under the rubric of Contemporary Female Identities in the Global South. The institution combines an academic research institute, an innovative technology laboratory and a platform for museum-quality exhibitions.
JCAF is a non-collecting foundation, which does not own art or house a private art collection, and curates its programmes according to a three-year themed cycle.
The current exhibition uses four different large-scale onsite installation works to explore “narratives around people and nation, identity and place, body and space” in the current South African moment.
