February 2026
look, listen
From left Manyaku Mashilo, In the Radiance of Stars, 2025, Southern Guild. Nicholas Mukomberanwa, Traditional Healer, 1979, Riaan Bolt Antiques. Cathy Stanley, Learning to Speak the Language, 2025/6, Vault Research. Thirza Schaap, Black Bouquet, 2025, Candice Berman Gallery. Kaleab Abate, Hidden Figures in the Park, 2024, Afriart Gallery.
Art fairs are not usually associated with quiet. They are noisy places of visual insistence and social theatre, where art and artists vie for attention and meaning is rarely subtle. Against this backdrop, the Investec Cape Town Art Fair’s decision to frame its 13th edition around the theme of listening feels almost mischievous. ‘In a world saturated with noise, urgency and individualistic self-expression, listening is an increasingly radical act,’ notes the fair’s all-women management team. ‘Listening is not passive. It is an active, embodied, ethical gesture.’ Whether an art fair can truly listen is an open question but posing it does shift the terms of engagement. The fair appears intent on slowing the way audiences engage. The question, of course, is what curation means in a context designed to move people briskly past objects.
Art fairs are not museums. They are temporary bazaars, erected and dismantled in a matter of days, governed by floor plans, lighting rigs and the logistics of global shipping. Recognising this, fairs globally have adopted the language of curatorial practice, carving out themed sections and inviting guest curators to lend shape and seriousness to what might otherwise read as a luxury mart. Now firmly positioned as South Africa’s leading art fair, Cape Town’s big art affair near the docks once again leans on invited curators to supply character and coherence.
Mariella Franzoni and Céline Seror, based respectively in Barcelona and Amsterdam, have proved themselves adept at wrangling the fair’s annual themes and return to curate the sections Tomorrows/Today and SOLO this year. Tandazani Dhlakama and Beata America join them and curate Generations and Cabinet/Record respectively. While the format reiterates established logics of fairs everywhere, as well as past presentations of the Cape Town fair, the thematic emphasis is pointed and provocative. It is also – cough – museal, in the sense of relating to museums.
It’s fitting then that two of this year’s guest curators, America and Dhlakama, have strong ties to Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCAA. America, an assistant curator at the museum, has assembled a photography selection. It is a brave, and necessary, focus on a medium that has lost some of its lustre in today’s strained market conditions. Highlights include Musa N. Nxumalo (Suburbia Contemporary), Tommaso Fiscaletti (Untitled) and Alf Kumalo (Peffers Fine Art).
From left Thirza Schaap, Ocean Plastic Bottle with Flowers, 2024, Candice Berman Gallery. Cathy Stanley, Words End, 2025/6, Vault Research. Tja Ling Hu, Man in Fire, 2024, Namuso Gallery.
Dhlakama, who left Zeitz MOCAA for a curatorial role at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada, has curated a number of exhibitions, including a wonderfully insightful 2018 showcase of painting from her homeland. She has made pairing the basis of her intervention at the fair. Zimbabwean sculptor Nicholas Mukomberanwa, a prominent member of the influential Workshop School, is shown alongside the wonder women weavers of Rorke’s Drift (Riaan Bolt Antiques), establishing a dialogue across nationality, medium, gender and generation.
Both America and Dhlakama were influenced by Zeitz MOCAA’s charismatic director and chief curator, Koyo Kouoh, who died suddenly in May last year, just before her concept for the 2026 Venice Biennale was announced. The biennale, which opens in May, will proceed with her vision intact. Kouoh’s legacy looms gently but insistently over the fair. In 2022, speaking to a group of American museum curators in Chicago, she offered a characteristically lucid reframing of her profession. ‘I don’t like the term curator,’ said Kouoh. ‘I think of myself as a mere exhibition maker and producer, most of the time as a midwife.’
There is no word for curator in French, she noted. The commonly used term is commissaire, someone responsible for a commission. In English, curator has expanded to encompass selection, authorship and, increasingly, brand identity. In French, she noted, the term is narrower, closer to responsibility and care. ‘Curatorial practice is a way of caring for society and its citizens,’ said Kouoh, ‘for caring for their vitality.’
It is a statement worth holding onto in the context of the fair, where care is secondary to velocity and impact. And yet, fairs have become some of the most influential curatorial platforms of the present moment. Kouoh delivered her keynote address at Expo Chicago. Like it or not, fairs shape taste and reflect its shifts. Not so long ago, painterly abstraction was seen as retrograde. This year’s fair includes numerous examples, among them works by Germiston artist and traditional healer Zolile Petshane (WorldArt).
The introduction of performance this year is new, and possibly telling. Performance resists easy commodification and demands presence, duration and attention. It insists on listening in a literal sense. Inserting it into the fair’s choreography complicates the usual rhythms of browsing and buying, even if only briefly.
None of this dissolves the contradictions of the art fair, nor should it. The Investec Cape Town Art Fair remains a place where commerce and culture negotiate terms in real time. For a city increasingly invested in curated experiences, from inner-city gastronomy itineraries to tours of the viniculture industry, this feels apt. The fair mirrors Cape Town’s own design-conscious aspirations, its celebration of artisanal traditions and authorship, and its mistrust of gaudy excess and noise. Listening, in this context, is less a directive than an aspiration
The 13th Investec Cape Town Art Fair runs from 20 to 22 February at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from 12h00 to 19h00. Tickets can be purchased via Webtickets.
Read more in House and Leisure Volume 20 (Curate), launching at our stand at Investec Cape Town Art Fair from 20-22 February.
