At the ongoing Investec Cape Town Art Fair, curator Tandazani Dhlakama is less interested in presenting isolated artworks than in staging a conversation across time. Her curated section, Generations, unfolds as a deliberately layered encounter between artists separated by geography, medium and age but united by shared visual and conceptual concerns.
“It’s supposed to be a place where people can think about intergenerational dialogue,” Dhlakama explains. “The theme of the entire fair is listening and the theme of the Generations section is call and response.”
Invited by the fair to curate the section, her first time doing so despite having attended for nearly a decade, Dhlakama approached the project with a clear ambition: to create unexpected proximities. “It’s really about bringing artists together who work in similar ways, who may or may not know each other,” she says. “Artists from different geographies, from Ethiopia with artists from South Africa, emerging artists with older artists and seeing how artists are interested in similar things or making work about the same thing.”
The section brings together nine galleries and 19 or so artists, creating a compact but dense field of visual echoes. Rather than foregrounding generational difference as rupture, Dhlakama is interested in continuity, the quiet ways in which contemporary practices carry older aesthetic and conceptual lineages.
“I’m hoping that people can look at art and realise that a lot of new styles are actually connected to older traditions,” she says. “What you see today is part of a longer, rich history of art making.”
One of the pairings she highlights comes via First Floor Gallery from Harare, where Shamilla Aasha is shown alongside Amanda Shingirai Mushate. “They both grew up in Bulawayo and they both work in abstract forms with lots of lines and pops of colour,” Dhlakama notes. “They’re both looking at womanhood and femininity.” The resonance is not forced; it emerges through formal language and shared preoccupations.
Elsewhere, Southern Guild presents Dominique Zinkpè, whose work mines Yoruba traditions across West Africa. “He’s looking at the twin, the ibeji”, Dhlakama explains. “But he’s taken an old tradition and really made it quite contemporary. If you look closely at his sculptures, you’ll see that the sculptures are made out of lots of ibeji twins.”
The geographic spread of Generations is intentionally wide. Dhlakama was determined, she says, “to not have the usual suspects”. The section includes galleries from Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and South Africa, alongside a European participant, OOA Gallery from Spain, appearing at the fair for the first time.
“I really wanted it to be quite international,” she says, noting the presence of artists from Benin and parts of North Africa alongside Southern and East African voices. The result is a section that mirrors the increasingly transnational character of contemporary African practice while remaining attentive to local specificity.
Importantly, the fair setting allows for rare proximity between audience and maker. While not all artists could travel, Dhlakama confirms that several are present. “I can confirm that at least four or five of the artists will be here, which is such a treat for the audience,” she says. “Usually you don’t get to meet and interact with the artists.”
If Generations succeeds, it will do so quietly, not through spectacle but through recognition. Recognition that artistic innovation rarely arrives fully formed and that even the most contemporary gestures often carry older rhythms beneath their surface.
As Dhlakama puts it, artists are “always finding each other, looking at each other for inspiration or sometimes working in parallel ways and not aware of each other and they come together”. At this year’s fair, that coming together is precisely the point.
Tandazani Dhlakama’s Generations section at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair pairs artists across borders and eras to reveal the quiet continuity shaping contemporary African art
