What kind of art world is South Africa moving into?

The conversation returns to me now, at the beginning of 2026, with an unexpected clarity. It took place last year at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, over dinner at the Standard Bank restaurant, 1862. 

Around the table sat a curator and an artist, both mid-career, both deeply embedded in the South African art world. What began as casual talk about exhibitions, travel and work slowly settled into something more sober. Neither was complaining. They were accounting.

What they described was not collapse, but contraction: fewer opportunities, less time, thinning institutional support and a growing sense that the energy required to remain in the sector no longer matched what it could reliably offer in return. At the time, the conversation felt anecdotal. As 2026 begins, it reads as a forecast.

If the years immediately following the Covid-19 pandemic were framed as a period of recovery, that language now feels largely exhausted. The question facing South African art is no longer how to rebuild what was lost but how to operate within a reality that appears permanently altered. What is emerging is not a return to stability but a recalibrated ecosystem — smaller, slower and more precarious — that is learning how to persist under constraint.

Public funding for the arts remains unreliable, shaped by administrative delays and shifting political priorities that rarely align with the long timelines required for cultural production. Private funding, meanwhile, has grown increasingly cautious. Many institutions have not closed but have hollowed out: fewer exhibitions, shorter programmes, smaller teams and a deepening dependence on freelance labour. Curatorial ambition continues to circulate rhetorically but material support has become harder to secure.

Looking ahead, this thinning is likely to persist. Institutions are expected to do more with less, even as expectations around access, transformation and public engagement remain high. Exhibitions will continue to confer legitimacy but often without adequate fees, production budgets or sustained investment in artists’ practices. The gap between symbolic value and material support is unlikely to narrow.

For artists, this has translated into working lives defined by fragmentation — a condition that appears set to become structural rather than temporary. The figure of the full-time artist, supported primarily by sales or institutional patronage, is increasingly the exception. Teaching, writing, design, film and other forms of cultural labour are no longer supplementary but central to survival. Artistic practice becomes episodic: concentrated during residencies or commissions, then suspended while other work takes precedence.

This has implications for the future of artistic production. Time-intensive practices, material experimentation and long-term research will remain difficult to sustain. As 2026 unfolds, many artists are likely to continue working in cycles of intensity and withdrawal, producing less frequently but with sharper deliberation. The risk is not a lack of ideas but a lack of conditions in which those ideas can be realised.

International platforms will continue to exert a powerful influence. With local markets limited and institutional support uneven, fairs, biennales and residencies abroad remain crucial points of access. In the coming years, the pressure to be legible to international audiences is unlikely to ease. Conceptually fluent, English-language practices will continue to circulate more easily, while work rooted in local specificity may struggle for sustained support at home.

This produces an enduring contradiction. South African art remains globally visible, yet locally precarious. Recognition abroad does not necessarily translate into economic stability and international success can coexist with profound insecurity. The outward-facing confidence of the sector often conceals its internal fragility.

Technology will increasingly shape this terrain. Artificial intelligence has moved beyond novelty and panic into routine use. Artists are already incorporating AI into research, writing, image-making and archiving, often quietly and pragmatically. Going forward, the question will be less about whether AI is used and more about who has access to it. As with funding and time, technological capacity mirrors existing inequalities, reinforcing divisions rather than flattening them.

The rhetorical intensity around decolonisation that characterised much of the previous decade has cooled, not because its demands have been met but because many cultural workers are now preoccupied with more immediate material concerns. Fees, contracts, payment delays and basic sustainability have taken precedence. In the years ahead, labour politics — rather than symbolic politics — are likely to define much of the sector’s internal debate.

What is emerging instead is a quieter politics of endurance. Informal networks, peer support and mutual aid will continue to play an outsized role, particularly for artists operating outside major urban centres. University galleries, NGOs and artist-run initiatives are likely to remain crucial, though they too operate under strain. Geography will continue to matter. Johannesburg remains dominant but pressured. Cape Town continues to attract disproportionate funding and international attention. Elsewhere, visibility remains contingent and fragile.

This is not a story of stasis. Artists are still responding, often incisively, to the social and political conditions around them. But the tempo has shifted. The expectation of constant production and visibility has given way to something more uneven and deliberate. In the coming years, the art world may produce less — but not necessarily think less.

As South African art moves further into this decade, the question is no longer what the sector could ideally become, but what it can realistically sustain. This is not a moment of collapse, but of reckoning: an acceptance that survival mode has reshaped the terrain, and that whatever future emerges will have to be built within its constraints.

I think again of that dinner in Makhanda, of the careful accounting taking place across the table. It was not despair that animated the conversation, but clarity. As 2026 begins, that clarity feels less like a private reckoning and more like a shared condition — one that will continue to shape South African art in the years ahead.