It seems counterintuitive that photography should be a noticeable presence as a fine art medium in an art fair that is organised around the concept of listening.
Yet so it is, since the overarching curatorial concept for the 2026 edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF) is “Listen”. The concept is described by the fair’s organisers, Fiera Milano, as “an increasingly radical act” in a world beset by information and sensory overload and wild geopolitical shifts. The suggestion is to slow down, concentrate and respond to the art overload with listening as an “active, embodied, ethical gesture”.
Of course, despite these insightful and commendable curatorial ideas as a guide for the ICTAF, in common with large art fairs all over the world, will be overloaded with sights, experiences and sounds. The point, after all, at least for the exhibitors, is to present work that has commercial appeal and to make some sales. Whether this clashes with the curatorial aspirations of the fair is a common tension between the forces of art and commerce, present at every edition.
This year might carry an extra frisson in the wake of the latest art world scandal, the cancelling of artist Gabrielle Goliath’s work Elegy from the South Africa Pavilion at another large-scale art jamboree, the Venice Biennale. Goliath is in the process of suing sport, arts & culture minister Gayton Mckenzie for his direct role in what appears to be a censorious step by the government.
Against this background, the interesting strand of photographic work that has emerged strongly in the South African contemporary art world represents both a certain nostalgia for simpler times and an exciting new visual field, overlapping and combining with other mediums and forms.
Photography has long been a central mode of artistic expression in South Africa. Its use as a medium to document the realities of the suppressed black experience under apartheid, in all its complexity and richness, has been widely seen and respected. The photojournalistic mode of the likes of Alf Kumalo and Peter Magubane developed into a more considered, more compositional mode, with an expanded set of subjects, in the work of David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Jodi Bieber and others.
While individual works, or even the odd showcase of photographic work, have marked previous editions of the ICTAF, there is a strong repertoire of work at this year’s edition which will hopefully attract the attention of museum-quality collectors, notorious for usually shunning the medium.
Zanele Muholi, one of our most prominent international photographic artists, presents work on the self-portrait, and Steven Cohen, fresh from his own censoring controversy at the Iziko National Gallery, exhibits photographic performance documentation in a showcase.
Elsewhere, specialised photographic gallery Gallery F, which also pilots the important Photographic Archive and Preservation Association of SA, presents a varied capsule exhibition of their roster at the ICTAF but also shows a wide variety of work at a dedicated show at the splendid Victorian Cape Town Club in town, showing photographers such as Bieber, Johan Kuus, David Lurie and Billy Monk.
The decade of the 1950s is sometimes called the Drum Decade, named for the unique photography in Jim Bailey’s Drum magazine, photography by the likes of Jurgen Schadeberg, Kumalo and others, that provided a distinctive visual style for black South African pop culture at the time. Ruarc Peffers Fine Art brings a selection of Kumalo’s work, along with other South African ‘jazz age’ photographers, which neatly ties together the visual medium and the ‘listen’ curatorial theme.
Another curatorial special section at ICTAF which takes a similar tack, combining the photographic image with the act of listening, is the multinational Cabinet/Record showcase. This intends to ‘broaden our understanding and relationship to the visual components of sound, through the expression and listening of photographs as record-keeping devices.’
Capping off all these photographic visual treats, the ORMS International Photography Prize launches for the first time at ICTAF this year, celebrating excellence in contemporary photography. Awarded to an exhibiting photographer from anywhere in the world, the prize recognises vision, craft and contribution to the photographic arts. The winner, selected by a jury and announced during the fair, will receive a cash prize together with a Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 printer, enabling the production of gallery-quality archival prints, in up to A2, that honour the integrity of each image. In their sponsor statement, ORMS, the well-known lab and fine art print business, commits to supporting artists and photographers at every stage while advancing photography’s place in the art landscape.
It sets the scene for what promises to be a very exciting year for photography at South Africa’s first major art fair of the year.
