Investec Cape Town Art Fair turns 10 in 2023

The Investec Cape Town Art Fair will be celebrating its 10th anniversary in February 2023 with an exhibition that examines the notion of time and promises to dive into concepts surrounding the past, present and future.

The three-day art exhibition is hosted every year at the Cape Town Convention Centre with local and international curators participating in creating themes for various installation areas. 

Established in 2013, what started out as a laid-back event for local audiences became an international fair with the assistance of Italian events company Fiera Milano in 2016. Since then, the event has opened its doors to both local and international exhibitors, visitors, art collectors, art journalists and galleries. 

With the Italian company on board in 2016 one of the notable exhibition areas, Tomorrows/Today, was co-curated by the founder of the African Artists’ Foundation Azu Nwagbogu, whose focus was on giving young artists a platform to demonstrate their work in front of an international audience, while bringing a more contemporary and youthful touch to the fair allowed artists the chance to introduce themselves through their art. “It is important to not lose the art in an art fair,” Nwagbogu says. 

Some of the artists who have exhibited include Zimbabwe-born Mathias Chirombo, whose work reflects spirituality through his use of dreams. His piece Journey feeds into the idea of spirituality, alluded to through the use of blue, with a play on creating shapes and shades giving an illusion of being connected with the sky, the sea and ancestral land.  

The fifth edition of the art fair in 2017 hosted more than 75 exhibitors from London, Paris, Milan, Madrid, Lagos, Abidjan, Addis Ababa, Harare, Nairobi, Accra and Dubai, represented by various art galleries globally. A new section, at the time titled Unframed, was introduced to showcase ambitious large-scale contemporary artworks that were designed by South African artists Mary Sibande, Liza Grobler, Katharien de Villiers and Michael Linders. The pieces were curated with the intention to be interactive and stimulate dialogue and to “present a diverse display of contemporary art” by including artwork from about 20 international galleries. 

At the sixth edition in 2018, one of the standout exhibition areas was the section Solo, curated by Johannesburg-based Nontobeko Ntombela. This was the section’s debut year, exclusively designed to provide women artists a space to use art to provide a variation of viewpoints on sociopolitical issues in society that women face, while demonstrating and shedding light on the contribution they make to art. Some of the artists featured included South African artist Buhlebezwe Siwani, American artist Renee Cox and photographer Lola Keyezua from Angola. 

In 2019 the art fair commissioned award-winning South African artist Karyn Wiggil to create 52 miniature drawings that fitted into a small red dot, where visitors were presented with a magnifying glass to examine the pieces more closely. The exhibition’s title, There’s an Art to Buying Art meant to relay intriguing reasons people invest in art. Wiggill is a specialist in miniature art drawings with this 52-piece collection including images of an eye, an art gallery and a home, to name a few, bringing a unique element to the art fair.

Before the coronavirus had been reported in South Africa in March 2020 the eighth edition of the fair took place in February with roughly 22 000 visitors featuring 107 exhibitors with 49 local and 58 international galleries. More than 400 artists participated in the event with attendees from Europe, America, the Middle East and Africa. The Tomorrows/Today section curated by artist and curator Nkule Mabaso and director of Artissima in Italy Luigi Fassi highlighted upcoming artists in the art world. The exhibition featured Zimbabwe-based Amanda Mushate, known for creating abstract art, as well as Ivory Coast-born French artist Francois-Xavier Gbre. 

With the ongoing lockdowns due to the pandemic the 2021 Investec Cape Town Art fair did not take place, however a digital event was hosted in September that year, in partnership with the Milan-based Miart International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair. The event highlighted the infusion of art and technology, as most events globally were moved into online platforms to encourage the supporting of the arts, one of the most negatively impacted sectors during the pandemic. 

The return of the in-person exhibition took place earlier this year in February with more than 98 local and international exhibitors from 20 countries and 17 first-time participants. The Solo exhibition space looked into “how artists have reacted to intimacy and introspection caused by the pandemic, as well as the effect that exchange and collaboration have on artistic practice as a whole”.  Some artists whose work was included in this section were South African artist and sculptor Johannes Phokela, Zimbabwe-born artist Brett Charles Seiler, who is based in Cape Town, and Botswana-born Thebe Phetogo, who does a mixture of sculpture, paintings and installations. 

Known for being the biggest contemporary art fair in Africa, this event is set to take place at the Cape Town Convention Centre from 17 to 19 February. It will include pieces from 99 exhibitors with 23 000 visitors anticipated. The exhibitions are divided into eight sections which include the main area, Tomorrows/Today:In & Out of Time, Solo: Time’s Pencil, Editions, Past/Modern, Alt, Connect and  Magazines & Publications, each curated uniquely.