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Mozart in Nyanga

Mozart in Nyanga

The wind whips up dust circles on the streets of Nyanga, Cape Town’s oldest township and home to over 10 000 people. People mill and congregate on the streets: a man holds a woman’s hand; a mother walks behind her three children wearing brightly coloured woollen caps; street vendors cook skewers of cow’s intestines braaied […]

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Eco Fashion

Nature rubs shoulders with the city in Karolina Olowsdotter’s fashion label. A Swedish fashion designer living in Cape Town, Karolina describes her label – Olowsdotter – as an eco-industrial look. This merging and clashing of contradictory elements expresses the duality felt by the 21st-century free-spirited nature lover who longs to feel the grass under her […]

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Taking a stroll through English with Mark Forsyth

Dawn Kennedy meets Mark Forsyth, the author of the witty, ribald Sunday Times number one bestseller The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language How and when did your interest in the connections between words begin? I was given a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary as a christening present […]

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Find Your Groove With Pedro The Music Man

“Use your imagination and you can make music with anything”, says musicologist Pedro Espi-Sanchis: “From earliest times, people used sound to make life lighter to bear. Getting as many sounds as possible out of a piece of kelp is an example of ancient creativity. Along the shoreline of the Cape Peninsula, the earliest hunters and […]

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A Summer Of Sculpture

As you enter the Everard Read Gallery this month, Beezy Bailey’s striking sculpture of Jesus greets you with more than wide open arms. In contrast to the classic Christ pose – head tilted to the right and right foot crossed over left, Beezy’s Jesus appears to be admiring his own rather nifty footwork. As your […]

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david goldblatt

Observing the Everyday: David Goldblatt

William K Ivins has called the camera the most important invention since the printing press. It allows us to re-create our world anew, dramatically bringing together past and present. This is startlingly evident in David Goldblatt’s exhibition, Kith Kin and Khaya, which compresses nearly 50 years of South African history into the SA Jewish Museum. […]

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Peter Clarke

At the opening of Peter Clarke’s exhibition in the South African National Gallery, a crowd of people of many backgrounds congregated for a common cause – to pay tribute to the artist who is a mentor and role model in his community at Ocean View. Taking the podium, the spry and articulate 82-year-old cracked a […]

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TATTOO ARTISTS

Dawn Kennedy penetrates the tattoo lover’s world, a place where pain, pleasure and permanence meet. Close your eyes and you could be at the dentist. The ink pen, the tool of the tattoo artist’s trade, makes a surprisingly loud and intimidating drone as it is switched on for the first time. It is used to […]

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Old Masters in a modern market

What might the stern sitters, gazing from their dark canvasses, make of the pounding of the djembe drums that stomps from the bustling Greenmarket Square into the Old Town House, home to Cape Town’s celebrated Michaelis collection of 17th century Dutch and Flemish masters? It’s an odd soundtrack, but the bustle of the market is […]

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