press play
Writer, editor and curator Sean O’Toole invites you to be joyfully bewildered with the theme of Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2025, ‘play’
Artwork ‘Dive In’ (2024) by Bekezela Mabena, Artist Proof Studio
An art fair is an intense, dizzying experience, somewhat akin to Charlie Bucket’s flabbergasted response to Willy Wonka’s chocolate room, ‘Oh, what an amazing sight!’ By its nature, an art fair is a place that staggers, bewilders and dazzles. This aroused bafflement is sponsored by the amplitude of colour, invention, opportunity, and – yes – snazzily dressed people. Look! Keep looking. Look again.
Speaking of immensity, this year’s twelfth edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair is the largest yet. All the available floor space in the Mother City’s grand marquee near the harbour has been gobbled up, requiring some inventive programming by the organisers to fit in all 124 exhibitors showcasing work by over 500 artists.
The first order of business for any visitor to this year’s fair is finding a map. You’ll need it. The fair’s layout is not arbitrary. Fair director Laura Vincenti, an architect by training, spends months deliberating over the floor plan. The importance of a well-conceived layout prompted London’s Frieze Art Fair in 2024 to outsource this critical labour to a design office.
A professional layout represents one way in which the profusion of a fair is tamed and made legible. Over the last few years, Vincenti and her enterprising team have also introduced themes to frame the everything-all-at-once experience of navigating Africa’s largest art fair. In 2021 and 2022, the plague years, the fair’s nervy post-digital presentation was gently held by the idea of ‘connection’. The operative word here is gently.
In 2023, the fair invited submissions that explored ‘time’. For last year’s fair – a bumper event that bucked a trend of bad news in the larger art world and made dealers in faraway cities take notice – the theme was ‘unbound’. This year, it is ‘play’. Play is an expansive and provocative word. Both in its noun and verb forms, it proposes engagement in an activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than for a serious or practical purpose.
Hmm? That’s not how most dealers or artists I interact with speak about fairs. Why ‘play’? ‘By encouraging this focus on play, the fair aims to engage visitors by showcasing alternative means of art-making,’ says Vincenti of this year’s theme.
‘Through each curated section, we will see how the curators have interpreted this thought-provoking theme, which has not been unpacked on this level. One strategy is the integration of curated spaces that go beyond traditional gallery formats, encouraging visitors to engage with artworks through multisensory experiences, live performances, and dialogue.’
As a curator involved in the past two editions of the fair, I know that an overarching rubric is useful. It helps focus the messaging of the fair to its public: come and play. It also helps curators refine their organising ideas for highlight sections such as Tomorrows/Today, Solo, Generations, and Lookout: come and play here. And, of course, it helps guide artists and their dealers as they develop pitch submissions for these concentrated sections: yes, we’ll pay to play.
But, as a visitor to the fair, how much store should you place in a theme? It really depends on what you expect of the theme and how it might activate the experience. Yes, Cape Town’s Demo Projects, which appears in Lookout alongside painter Richard Mudariki’s artHARARE and Soto Gallery from Lagos, is known for its playful exhibitions – like flooding the gallery and asking visitors to wear their best shoes to the opening. But Demo is showing paintings by Zander Blom and sculptures by Vusumzi Nkomo. They’re for sale.
Recently, artist Mankebe Seakgoe, who will be showing her text-filled charcoal-and-ink drawings with BKhz Gallery in Tomorrows/Today, posted a poem by Lebanese-American philosopher and occasional artist Kahlil Gibran: ‘Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end.’ It is, I would venture, the best advice for making sense of the befuddling wow of this year’s fair in its biggest-ever edition.
Read more stories like this in House and Leisure Volume 16 (Play), which launched at our stand at the ICTAF. Shop now to get your copy and join us in discovering bold creative expressions, engaging conversations, and an unmissable showcase of talent.
