In 2024 FNB Art Joburg established a photography focused pavilion within the fair to bring greater awareness to the medium as an art practice. Dubbed GIF the space offers purpose built sections where galleries take up the opportunity to spotlight photographers in their programme. A space to show works by image makers, the section spotlights all lens-based media as the ordinary meaning of the spaces name suggests: a format that supports both static and animated images.
In 2025 the GIF pavilion will be occupied by Stevenson, Eclectica Contemporary, Santu Mofokeng, BKhz and Artists as First Responders by STILL Artist Residency.
Stevenson
Robin Rhode
Robin Rhode presents The Stripper, now almost 22 years old, speaking directly to the framework of GIF. Shot in Newtown, a historic precinct formerly considered the city’s industrial centre, the animation showcases Rhode methodically ‘stripping’ a drawing of van, each stolen part wiped away on the wall’s surface. With the use of his iconic illusionistic freeze-frame technique, Rhode achieves a narrative effect which reads like an flip book. The animation, imbued with both realism and satirical whimsy, speaks to the long term influences of Arte Povera and Dadaism on his work. Using common materials such as white chalk and black housepaint, Rhode staged guerrilla interventions in the urban environment at the start of his career, a mode he continues in the present day, most recently seen in works such as Planes (2024), exhibited in Joburg Hymn. The artist explains ‘My work delineates borders taking daily contorts, comforts and drudgeries and depicts forms totally removed from their norms. Almost like objects in evolution while not offering a solution. A kind of end-beginning.’ The Stripper forms part of the Museum of Modern Art collection in the department of New Media.
Eclectica Contemporary
Natalie Paneng
Natalie Paneng is a Johannesburg-based transmedia artist and digital worldbuilder, crafting surreal narratives through installation, performance, and creative technology. A BA Honours graduate in Dramatic Arts from Wits University, she blends self-taught digital skills with her theatre background to explore the role of the alternative Black woman in shifting narratives. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with shows at Galerie Eigen + Art, Stevenson Gallery, and Kunsthalle Bremen, among others. She has presented at HKW and major digital art festivals like MUTEK Montreal and IDFA, where her VR project Natalie’s Trifecta won the 2023 Special Jury Prize for creative technology. A past resident at Studio Quantum and Gasworks London (2024), she continues to explore the intersections of science, art, and spirit.
Santu Mofokeng
BKhz
Tatenda Chidora
Tatenda Chidora’s work focuses on the subject of the African male as he aims to face issues related to his own identity within his portraiture work. “ I want to translate the responsibilities we have and go through in our societies. There’s always something we run away from. In my images, there are elements that we as African men are happy to face, some things that we are comfortable with, and something we are not comfortable talking about…The pins, the surgical masks, and the thermal blanket I have used in my photographic compositions are daily-life objects collected in various circumstances. They suggest a context of existence where African men strive to find a way of survival and how to be able to make it to the next step as individuals” says Chidora.
Artists as First Responders by STILL Artist Residency.
The AFROPortals Project_Space (AFROPortals) is an experimental, interactive, art and design lab stewarded by the US-based platform Artist As First Responder (AAFR) dedicated to creating sacred spaces for imagination, investigation, and rest by championing artists whose practices heal communities and save lives. Through public forums, residencies, archives, and exhibitions AAFR, founded by independent curator Ashara Ekundayo, utilizes the principles of Afrofuturism, Black Memory, and Collective Liberation as worldbuilding materials to sustain creative inquiry and research praxis that connects people across genre and geography. Our AFROPortals framework sits inside of a global network of specific sites acting as a crucible for contemporary artistic exploration and dialogue developed in collaboration with the Black Cultural Zone CDC and Shared Studios whose global portal network has connected more than 700,000 people across 30+ countries since 2014.
Santu Mofokeng Foundation
Santu Mofokeng: Concert at Sewefontein
Many who live in places like the sleepy tenant labour community of Bloemhof imagine a better life elsewhere, without the endless toil and drudgery of farm life. Rarely do they get to put their talent on display.
Sewefontein is the place to be for anyone who’s worth his or her salt. Here people are offered the chance to sing or perform—or do both.
Out of the purview of employers and minders they are free to frolic, mate or get drunk, according to their wish or inclination. It is on weekends like this that shebeens thrive.