Subscribe

Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe and South African Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies Sarah Nuttall’s book Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2008) is described as “a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. The authors write: Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale.

Drawing on themes from Mbembe and Nuttall’s essays interrogating life in Africa’s economic and cultural hub, Afropolis examines the dialogue created between the city and its people. Those creating art, those making and eking out a living and those passing through it.

Johannesburg is a metropolis in which its people are in a constant state of flux; between balancing a sense of allure against that of strife. For artists, the city is often materially linked to their practice, making materiality an intersectional component to production. Materials, subject, and space are used to make sense of identity and place-making within the sprawling city.

For the curators, these works seek to address and reconcile life in the city by challenging the reactionary prose attributed to it by Mbembe and Nuttall.

Ideas of migration and convergence are explored through tactile forms, the landscape and the people who occupy it is seen in both paintings and photography with performance enlivening realities. Positioned as a portrait of Johannesburg, this is a prompt to engage life, feelings and reality in The Elusive Metropolis.

3 September 2023 
16:00PM – 17:30PM