ART & POETRY

The Wisdom of Suspended Time: Artichokes and Fava Beans

The Allegory of the Vanity of the Plastic Spoon by Coral Bijoux

The Fish System: A Poem by Jolyn Phillips

A Poem by Gabeba Badaroon: My Tongue Softens on The Other Name

Seeds from the Street to the Seas

Listen to Zayaan Khan and Coila-Leah Enderstein’s soundscape “Seeds from the Street to the Seas”.

“Reviving seeds as commons, through a telling of seeds as story, we move from seed as object to seed as relation, making visible that which has been concealed and hidden from sovereignty.“ says Zayaan

https://www.mixcloud.com/ZayKay/seeds-from-the-streets-to-the-seas/

Painting By : Cynthia Nair

Cynthia Nair’s paintings draw critically on several aesthetic and cultural influences. One of these is the impressionist, Paul Gauguin, with Nair subversively responding to this artist’s exoticising of the bodies of women and cuisine from the global South (Tahiti, where he was temporarily exiled).

In Nair’s alternative celebration of the bodies, agencies and beauty of women of colour, and her complex portrayals of women’s relationships with one another and their engagement with the world surrounding them, she focuses provocatively on metaphors of food and eating.

These often configure emotions, feelings that can’t be conveyed in written text: repressed or expressed feelings of desire, compelling passions, attachment and sensuality – as revealed in these paintings. Cynthia Nair is a painter based in Johannesburg.

mannequins-painting

naked-lady-painting

sisters-waiting-for-love

The-broken-christ-mised-media

Painting By : Zulfa Abrahams

Zulfa Abrahams is an artists who has taught in the English, Women’s and Gender Studies and Anthropology Departments at the University of the Western Cape (email: zlfabrahams@gmail.com).

In much documentary photography that depicts starvation or hunger, the face of hunger (usually feminized) is often almost expressionless in the sense that hungry women are seen as totally destitute and almost entirely lacking in human complexity because of their desperation.

Zulfa Abrahams, a painter who teaches at the University of the Western Cape, represents highly expressive women’s faces. In this painting she conveys the ways in which hunger, especially for women, is linked to complex emotional and psychological states that may include a sense of responsibility for others, deep feelings of shame, and profound anger towards and about the local, domestic or broader situations that cause individuals’ hunger