Friday News brought to you by South Africa's best read!

Tsonga mixtape with love from Sho Madjozi

Friday Paballo Chauke -

Sho Madjozi's latest mixtape honours her Xitsonga roots – and Thomas Chauke approves

The Portfolio: Thobani K

Friday Thobani K -

The photographer considers water as a healing force as his cow gives birth

Artist Hussein Salim’s journey to find his place in the world

Friday Mary Corrigall -

Mary Corrigall meets with the Sudanese artist on the occasion of his largest solo exhibition in Joburg

Half of the National Arts Council’s PESP funding has gone to a connected 12%

Friday Lloyd Gedye -

Roadies’ report shows members had first dibs on the National Arts Council’s money

‘Photographs In Our Mother Tongue’: The new South Africa under scrutiny

Friday Nolan Stevens -

A retrospective of photographic works at the Standard Bank Gallery offers a snapshot in time

Afr(Ind)ian Fiction: Reckoning with belonging

Friday Gwen Ansell -

A collaboration featuring Dhruv Sodha, Shailesh Pillay, Muhammad Dawjee and Othnell Mangoma Moyo has lifted up the musicians’ individuality

National Arts Council surplus policy ‘breaks Act’

Friday Lloyd Gedye -

A funding policy loophole seems to be encouraging feeding at the trough at the NAC

The Portfolio: Lindokuhle Ndlovu meets Mr Mbhele

Friday Lindokuhle Ndlovu -

A chance encounter with a stranger had the photographer rethinking the meaning of scars

Hearing Coltrane: Like watching a grown man learn how to speak

Friday Amiri Baraka -

Watching several of Coltrane’s harmonic and melodic experiments at the cusp of the 1960s, Amiri Baraka emerges frightened, yet energised

Don’t Miss: Our weekly round-up of live and in-person events

Friday Arts Desk -

Travels in Afrofuturism, Themba Mkhize and an exhibition focusing on Johannesburg’s informal recyclers take centre stage in our weekly events guide

Escape from Pretoria: ‘Our cells were on the first floor, so there was nowhere to dig to’

Friday Tim Jenkin -

How Tim Jenkin, Stephen Lee and Alexandre Moumbaris escaped Pretoria Central with a handmade wooden key

Matthew Krouse’s ‘mid-career retrospective of a no career’

Friday Sean O Toole -

An exhibition of Matthew Krouse’s underground films reveal an agitator awed by the tradition of ‘dirty queens’

The voices in Makhafula Vilakazi’s head

Friday Vus'umuzi Phakathi -

A poet raised in transit, Makhafula Vilakazi speaks from the margins, even as he has almost escaped them

The Portfolio: John Phalane’s art ‘gives me a sense of being myself’

Friday John Phalane -

Emanating from years spent behind the wheel, the artist’s style is part memory, part imagination

‘Skemerdans’: A mal interpretation of Cape Flats nightlife

Friday Mia Arderne & Duane Jethro -

Amy Jephta and Ephraim Gordon have written and directed a noir TV series that evokes nostalgia as well as tension and violence

Chichu Art Museum: ‘A site to rethink the relationship between nature and people’

Friday Julian Meyrick -

A visit to Japanese art island Chichu is both a meditation and an education

(R)evolution in 4/4: The contribution of South Africa’s urban music to new meanings of freedom

Friday Njabulo Zwane -

Kwaito and house music have broadened the scope of struggle and stretched the definition of freedom

Cabin Fever: A short story by Phumlani Pikoli

Friday Phumlani Pikoli -

Cabin Fever was originally written in June 2020 and edited by KT

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