Chris Roper

Cape Town is abuzz with rumours that its enterprising restaurateurs have embarked on a quest to produce the ultimate dining experience, writes <b>Chris Roper</b>.

A new, short film by South African Aurelia Driver has gained a showing at Cinema Nouveau as part of a new drive by the major distibutor to showcase local work. Chris Roper was there.

Watching Lien Botha conduct a walkabout is like watching a surgeon perform open-heart surgery on herself, writes Chris Roper.

Brett Murray’s sculptures play with notions of white identity. He spoke to Chris Roper.

Brett Murray’s latest show combines whimsy and craft, writes Chris Roper.

<i>Acid Alex</i> is the autobiography that traces a life lived across a South African terrain that might not be familiar to that many of us, writes Chris Roper.

<i>Send & Receive</i> is one where girls get tipsy after two glasses of wine, where men are either good mates or scoundrels, and where the only black person in the novel speaks English with "a faint American accent" writes Chris Roper.

<i>Democracy X</i> is an allegory for a typically South African democracy — fragmented, populated by small splinter groups with large grievances, large interest groups with small ambitions, and infinite permutations of both poles. Chris Roper takes a look at an unusual exhibition that’s about history, and about the sometimes uncomfortable legacy of that history.

Nine rooms of utterly stupendous art, by more than 150 artists, await you at the Iziko: South African National Gallery. Wonderfully curated, beautifully displayed, the artworks of <i>A Decade of Democracy</i> lead you into 10 years of diverse, combative, epiphanic art production, says Chris Roper.

"The fact that a still from Kentridge’s animation is to be part of the Constitutional Court art works collection should come as no surprise. Our Constitution is deeply, fundamentally racial, if by racial we mean overwhelmingly aware of race." William Kentridge’s <i>9 Drawings for Projection</i> has been chosen to launch the Constitutional Court to the public, writes Chris Roper.

A good way to spend a Sunday is to buy a picnic at Spier Estate and wander the banks of the Eerste Rivier. Besides the usual pleasures of lolling about, you can take in the artworks that make up Waterway, the Spier outdoor sculpture biennial, writes Chris Roper.

It’s tempting to try and understand Steven Cohen, that "queer Jewish freak", as standing in the tradition of a Bob Flanagan, an artist obsessed with the body and the multitudinous ways in which it can be abused, manipulated, mortified and modified in the name of art, writes Chris Roper.

Power, surfing and French knitting: South African sculpture is diverse in the extreme, writes Chris Roper after taking a look at four superb exhibitions in Cape Town that showcase the young guns of South African sculpture.

I’ve always hated Darrel Bristow-Bovey. Once, I too would get Mondi Award nominations. Once, I was a young man with aspirations to be the next Barry Ronge. Except, obviously, with more luck with the girls. Then along came Mr Four Times in a Bloody Row Mondi Winner, Mr Lifetime Achievement Award. And now, I work on the Internet, whinges Chris Roper.

In the catalogue for the Brett Kebble Art Awards, entrepreneur Kebble asks the salient, if rhetorical question: "Art? What does a businessman know about art? As much, I suppose, as an artist knows about business." Yet the Brett Kebble Art Awards have won kudos in the fickle world of art patronage, writes Chris Roper.

Chris Roper complains about noisy audience members and inefficient security guards at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Cape Town.

Review: <i>Lien Botha</i>

by Ashraf Jamal

(Taxi/David Krut)

Public sculpture is no longer restricted to parks and malls. Chris Roper finds out what happens when art becomes an intrusion.

The works hover between a robust expressiveness and a breathtaking fragility and force you to confront the deliquescence encoded into all art forms, writes Chris Roper.

<b>Reviews: </b><i>In the Rapids</i> edited by Linda Rode and Jakes Gerwel (Kwela) and <i>Urban One</i> edited by Dave Chislett (Spearhead).

For artist Paul du Toit the sweet smell of success is tainted by an industry of sour grapes, writes Chris Roper.

Some works are fantastical, some are quasi-realist portraits, some are whimsically kitsch and some are abstract, writes Chris Roper.