One event that stands out during the year for Joburgers is the FNB Joburg Art Fair. Sure, it's for certain polished types who care about local art and culture and get excited about walking around the partitioned spaces of the Sandton Convention Centre (SCC) looking at what local galleries have deemed à la mode for 2025. But, whether you care about it or not, art is a marker of a specific time and place, putting into paint, pencil or print some of the circulating ideas of now.
From September 5 to 7, the commercial capital of the city will turn into a cultural catwalk for the 18th edition of the fair. Eighteen years is dogged longevity in any city. In Joburg, it’s a miracle. Restaurants barely last a season and nightclubs implode before their first birthday, but at the SCC, where the Art Fair air is equal parts acrylic and ambition, what meets the eye and intellect is a sprawl of contradictions that somehow add up. gallery HUB is the power suit: Stevenson, Goodman, Everard Read. LAB is the sandbox, where experiments wobble between genius and folly. MAX handles the unmanageable, ETC the bibliophiles, ORG the institutions, AUX the talkers and arguers. It’s a map of Joburg itself: messy, restless and full of unapologetic energy.
As always there's a star of the show, and this year, the FNB Art Prize was awarded to an artist with an unusual trajectory. A few weeks ago, Thato Toeba was invited to the podium at the Art Prize announcement event and said with humorous deprecation: “I'm shocked to have won the FNB Art Prize. I can't even draw.” The artist is fairly new to her practice. “I was a lawyer,” she added. “I stopped responding to emails, And I became an artist. My supervisor doesn't know where I am. When he finds out about this prize he'll finally know what happened to me.”
The jury's words are read out: “Quiet force ... deliberate and layered ... a commitment to process as much as to meaning.” They have a lot of good things to say about Toeba's collage technique.
Born in Maseru, Lesotho in 1990, Toeba has already racked up a list of accolades; An LLM from Humboldt University in Berlin, a stint at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, a PhD left tantalisingly unfinished. The thesis was on corruption, they tell me when I nail them down for an interview, and somewhere between footnote 312 and the collapse of Lesotho's economy, Toeba realised that cutting and pasting pictures is a more honest way of telling the truth than writing a chapter no-one reads.
Art, they discovered, could reach more people than jurisprudence. “A thesis,” Toeba explains, “is a conversation between myself, my supervisor, and maybe an examiner. Art is a conversation with everyone.”
Instead of law books, now Toeba's message comes from glue and National Geographic magazines, archival scraps and whatever detritus of empire comes to hand — to build their visual language manifested as collage and assemblage — essays without conclusions, images without borders.
Toeba's work interrogates how African life is represented and misrepresented — how the continent and its people have been described, photographed and catalogued into submission — iconic pages of bare-breasted women in National Geographic, heroic wildlife and exotic poverty that shaped thousands of school projects. Toeba slices them open and reassembles them until the superficiality of the assumed “normal” collapses into absurdity. Politics is heavy here, but the delivery is light. Toeba laughs at themselves with the candour of someone who, in their acceptance speech, admits to disappointing their family, fleeing their thesis and who still won R100,000 and their own exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery next year. “I asked my friends, can I eat at your house, because I'm giving this art thing a try and I'm going to be poor for a little bit,” they say.
The thing about collage is that it's always been the art of the dispossessed. Oil painting and marble are for emperors and martyrs; collage is what children in kindergarten are given to create art. Toeba and their twin sister made scenes on cardboard; apparitions of fridges stocked with paper food, beds tucked with paper people. Their practice of cutting and remaking their world began in their bedroom in Maseru.
Now the works are materially rich — paper stacked on paper until the surface becomes topography. They are visually sly: familiar photos are set against strange textures, and sometimes juxtapositions are politically barbed, challenging IMF trade regimes and colonial legal structures with the same seriousness they might once have employed for cross-examination. And the works are slow. This, says Mandla Sibeko, director of FNB Art Joburg, is what makes Toeba's art stand out: “In a time when quick visuals and surface level messages are everywhere, their work takes another route. It's careful, considered and honest about complexity.”
At the award presentation Toeba thanked the Stevenson Gallery “for adopting me”, their friends “for being role models”, and God “for looking out for me even when I wasn't looking out for him”. They cracked a joke about the prize money. It's been R100,000 since 2011, and noted, “we all know what's happened to the economy”.
Joburg has had 15 of these FNB Art Prize winners now. Toeba's feels different, not because the work is better or more clever, but because it feels the most true. They don't decorate walls, they deconstruct the wallpaper of our perceptions. From a desk piled with legal texts to a studio piled with magazine cuttings, Toeba has collaged a life, deliberate and layered, meaning stacked upon meaning. And who needs to draw when you can do that?
Art Joburg is at the Sandton Convention Centre from Friday September 5 until Sunday September 7. For more info, click here
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.