Art to Art with Natasha Norman

Athi-Patra Ruga is a South African artist whose practice is transdisciplinary and transgressive in its nature and intention. His production encompasses performance, video, tapestry, painting and sculpture. His earlier work engaged with what the post-1994 moment in South Africa meant for his generation: a moment of hope, vibrancy, and fraught with unforeseen complexities and inherited trauma. As such, his practice is entangled in paradox and productive tensions, engaging with the notions of trans - transformation, transience, transgression, as a means of radical self- exploration. His work is characterized by a practice of world-making and self-invention within a fictional framework that he has created entitled Azania, a utopian realm for the critique of post-apartheid nationalism and the foregrounding of queer, femme and black experiences. Our conversation was poised between the memory of an historical moment in the Cape Town art scene that we shared in 2012 and reflections of the current Cape Town art scene following the 2026 Investec Cape Town art fair. Athi generously discussed what he sees as his current role in the arts ecosystem, now working from his home in Hogsback in the Eastern Cape.  ArtThrob is South Africa’s leading independent online contemporary art magazine, founded in 1997 by Sue Williamson to provide critical coverage, reviews, and interviews. It acts as a vital, non-profit, Creative Commons-licensed platform focusing on national and international South African artStephen Cohen is a visual and performance artist born in Johannesburg. His art spans public interventions and gallery and theatre performances, often exploring themes of identity, marginalisation, and societal norms.Jay Pather is a Professor at University of Cape Town, directing the Institute for Creative Arts. He is a performance theorist, choreographer and curator. He curates the Infecting the City Festival; the ICA Live Art Festival and the Afrovibes Festival (The Netherlands).WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery was founded in 2008 in Cape Town, WHATIFTHEWORLD is acontemporary art gallery focusing on artists from Africa and the diaspora. It showcases multi-disciplinary, group and solo projects that engage with socio-political themes. Athi-Patra Ruga is represented by WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery.Ilulwane is a 2011–2012 multi-disciplinary performance art piece by Athi-Patra Ruga. It is a haunting, site-specific synchronized swimming performance that explores themes of queer identity, cultural tradition, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It was staged in public swimming baths, including Performa 11 in New York and the Long Street Baths in Cape Town.The Bodyland Residency in Hogsback is a 14-day high-octane, Eastern Cape-based artistic incubator established in 2020 by Victory of the Word (VOW) under the mentorship of artist Athi-Patra Ruga. It provides emerging artists in visual art, film, fashion, and performance with a space for creative exploration, mentoring, and engagement with land and heritage in the Tyhume Valley.Gabriella Goliath is a Ph.D candidate at the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, where her research continues to explore ethical strategies for addressing violence and absence in contemporary art. Her artwork proposed for the South African Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, Elegy, was canceled by South Africa's culture minister over references to Gaza, sparking backlash and a failed legal challenge.The Zeitz MOCAA Gala is a premier annual fundraising event held in Cape Town, South Africa, celebrating contemporary African art, culture, and philanthropy. It gathers global art patrons, collectors, and artists for a glamorous night of entertainment and dining to support the museum's curatorial and educational programs.Brought to you by Latitude MediaProduction, Mix and Master by Gerald Kent

Josephine Grindrod Josephine Grindrod is an artist who situates her painting practice as an embodied, critical and generative response to found narratives, objects and images. Her visual research draws on psychoanalysis in order to challenge traditionally male, Colonial, language and knowledge systems. She positions imagination as an important tool in artmaking. A tool that can enable a productive deconstruction of memories, landscape or art history in order to re-vision beliefs and prejudices. Her art making is a conscious process of redressing her personal history, led by intuition, poetry and dreaming. As an artist who is led by process and embodied material making, our discussion of her forthcoming presentation at the Cape Town Art Fair 2026 weaves together ideas and influences that lay the foundation for a viewer’s understanding of her visual world. Art to Art hosted by Natasha NormanBrought to you by Latitude Media

Rosie Mudge is an artist who works in many media. She is known for her large-scale paintings with shimmering colour surfaces crafted from industrial automotive paint and glitter. Her evocative surfaces shape latent phrases derived from pop songs, and her work draws on the look, feel, and sound of the late 90s and early 2000s, a time she associates with the overwhelming experience of trying to understand herself in relation to the world and of being profoundly misunderstood by it. Most recently, the sense of worldly experience impacting her artistic practice has extended to the event of her becoming a mother. In this conversation, we unpack some of the experiences and societal expectations around motherhood and parenting that have impacted Rosie as an artist. Most particularly, we discuss works presented at the Iziko South African National Gallery's exhibition ‘Motherhood: Paradox and Duality’, which brings together over 70 artists across diverse media and time periods in South Africa to explore the complexities of mothering in a rapidly changing world.Rosie Mudge and I sat down to our conversation at the beginning of May 2025.Iziko South African National Gallery is situated in the Company Gardens in Cape Town: https://www.iziko.org.za/museums/south-african-national-gallery/SMAC Gallery is located in Cape Town and Stellenbosch. https://www.smacgallery.com/ Paarden Eiland is a light industrial suburb located along the Table Bay in Cape Town.Investec Cape Town Art Fair is an annual art fair hosted in the Cape Town Convention Centre in February.Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood is written by Lucy Jones and first published in America by Pantheon Books in 2023.Audio edit, mix and master done by Gerald KentBrought to you by Latitude Aparthotel

In this conversation with photographer and teacher, Vanessa Cowling, we discuss how the origins of photography have impacted her approach to camera-less photography. Vanessa discusses how various artistic exchanges have forged new approaches in her art practice that is centred upon connection and community building. Considering her place in the world has led to the development of a sustainable photographic garden on a disused piece of land outside the University of Cape Town’s photography building. From this project, students are taught sustainable darkroom techniques that see photographic processes derived from the garden and returned to the earth for composting and regrowth. This cycle of creation, decay and rebirth has become an enduring metaphor in Vanessa’s photographic story-telling. Since her most recent artist residency in the Tankwa, Vanessa has begun working on with the importance of darkness to both insect biodiversity and the human condition.I chatted to Vanessa at the Latitude recording studio in Seapoint in December 2024.Biennale de la photographie de Mulhouse, Thann, describes itself as a cross-border festival whose aim is to disseminate contemporary photography through powerful and unifying events.Vanessa’s three main camera-less processes are: lumen prints, phytograms and anthotypes.The Stellenbosch group show was titled Merging Matter. It was hosted at the Oude Leeskamer from March to May in 2024.Shoreline was an exhibition hosted at the Barnard Gallery in July and August 2018.William Henry Fox Talbot was an English scientist, inventor, and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuriesSir John Herschel, a British astronomer and scientist, arrived in Cape Town in January 1834 to conduct astronomical observations in the Southern Hemisphere. He established an observatory at Feldhausen, near Table Mountain, and his work contributed significantly to our understanding of the southern skies. He also made important contributions to photography and was a pioneer in the study of cyanotypes.In photography, sodium thiosulfate, often called "hypo," is a fixer used to remove unexposed silver halide from photographic films and paper. It functions by dissolving these silver salts, leaving behind the silver image and stabilizing the picture.Fixing the Shadows was Vanessa’s Masters Degree and exhibition at the University of Cape Town in 2023.Members of the Photography department at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art are listed on the University’s website: https://humanities.uct.ac.za/michaelis/people/academic-staffGabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and academic.The Tankwa Artscape Residency is hosted at Stonehenge Private Reserve in the Karoo. https://tankwaartscape.co.za/AfrikaBurn is a community of participants. The main annual AfrikaBurn event takes place in the Tankwa Karoo, located between the Northern Cape and Western Cape Provinces of South Africa, usually at the end of April every year. https://www.afrikaburn.org/The Darkness Manifesto was written by Johan Eklöf, PhD, a Swedish bat scientist and writer, most known for his work on microbat vision and more recently, light pollution.Host: https://natashanorman.co.za/

Stephane Conradie is a printmaking lecturer at the University of Cape Town who won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for 2023. She is known for her bricolage assemblages composed of the trinkets and collectables from family homes that carry the memory and culture of social groups. She draws particularly from her own family experience in the Northern Cape and Southern Namibia, using once treasured objects to investigate the transfer of knowledge and culture through familial generations whose experience of home has been marked by political migration and dislocation.  You can find out more about the Standard Bank Young Artist Award on their website: https://sponsorships.standardbank.com/sbgs/sponsorship/arts-and-culture/young-artist-awardStephané Conradie’s Artist website: https://stephaneeconradie.com/aboutpageStephané’s travelling exhibition is titled ‘Wegwysers Deur Die Blinkuur.’You can read a review of the exhibition at The National Arts Festival by David Mann on ArtThrob. https://artthrob.co.za/2024/08/20/sentimental-assemblages-stephanie-conradies-wegwysers-deur-die-blinkuur/. The show is scheduled to open at the Iziko Castle of Good Hope on 18 February 2025.Art to Art with Natasha NormanBrought to you by Latitude Aparthotel

Sanell Aggenbach is an artist skilled in many creative outputs. Through painting, sculpture and printmaking she creates poetic visual relationships between materials and imagery that comment on the South African reality. Her work draws from a variety of figurative sources, both in media and daily life, which she blends with a playful ambiguity and soft parody. Her quietly disarming artworks address many poignant issues. Sanell and I discuss the underlying cultural attachments to land in South Africa and reflected on key moments in her artistic career.Host: Natasha NormanGuest: Sanell AggenbachMade possible by Latitude Aparthotel and Sean Loots as Studio Manager. Audio Edited by Gerald Kent

Michael Amery is a painter of landscapes shaped and moulded by humankind. His methodical drawing and painting techniques mimic the construction of scenery by human industry, but his interest in the land as holding a symbolic value of culture and identity is something we discuss in this episode. Alien plant species that have become iconic visual markers of South African land are charged to display beauty despite the conflicting circumstances of their colonial history. Whether natural or man-made the far reaching effects of humanity’s impact on land are deeply felt in Michael’s visual and intellectual pursuits on canvas.Michael's Website: https://michaelamery.com/Michael's Gallery: https://www.131agallery.com/ NOTES from our discussion for further interest:David Krut Projects is a gallery and print studio based in Johannesburg. Jane Bennett is an American political theorist and philosopher. We discuss ideas from her influential book "Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things" published in 2009. You can visit the Pierneef station panels at the La Motte Gallery in Franschoek and the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch.  Many thanks to Latitude Aparthotel for the use of their recording studio run by the delightful Sean Loots. And a special thank you to Gerald Kent for the editing and audio boost production.

Welcome to Art to Art, a Latitude Art Podcast. I'm Natasha Norman, your host and a practicing artist. In this season, we'll journey into the world of art and its relationship to land, exploring the lives and inspirations of remarkable local artists and their unique approaches to the South African landscape. I'm a practicing artist with a deep passion for the materials and processes behind the work of art. And I look forward to sharing these artists' stories with you in this season.Natasha NormanBrought to you by Latitude Aparthotel

Join Natasha Norman on the Latitude Art Podcast as she interviews Zarah Cassim, a painter known for her dreamlike landscapes and exploration of perception. Zarah shares her nomadic lifestyle, moving between continents with her family and finding inspiration in uncertainty. Despite the challenges, she remains dedicated to her art, creating amidst changing landscapes and materials.Brought to you by Latitude Aparthotel Hosted by Natasha Norman