Africa's depth and diversity on display — inside this year’s RMB Latitudes Art Fair

Botswana Focus

At this year’s RMB Latitudes Art Fair, a dedicated Botswana Focus spotlights the country’s dynamic and fast-evolving art scene.

The project brings together collectives and cultural platforms including TBP Artist Collective, The Space Botswana, ReCurate, Banana Club and ARC (Art Residency Centre Botswana). RMB Botswana supported and celebrated the project with a pre-fair exhibition in Gaborone, produced by Ora Loapi.

The Botswana Focus explores the notion of borders — geographic, ideological and artistic — and reflects the region’s shift from heritage-based narratives to more contemporary, experimental practices.

By concentrating its international spotlight on one locale, RMB Latitudes fosters deeper engagement with Botswana’s cultural and artistic ecosystems, offering audiences a more nuanced understanding of the country’s creative identity. It’s not about discovering a new voice, but about asserting one, with artists and cultural practitioners actively reshaping the narrative through experimentation, dialogue and collaboration.

In a global art world that often overlooks smaller markets, the Botswana Focus asserts a bold presence, making space for Botswana’s stories to be seen, heard, and supported.

RMB Latitudes Art Fair at Shepstone Garden, 23-25 May 2025 (Photo: Courtesy of the fair)

Talks programme  

The Talks this year embrace this momentous time for South Africa (as we prepare to host the G20), offering a series of dynamic, future-facing conversations that explore how artists, curators, collectors and cultural thinkers are forging new connections across continents and disciplines.

Through dialogue, we aim to build bridges — between Africa and the world, tradition and technology, heritage and innovation.

From the rise of digital tools in the African art economy to creative currents flowing from East Asia to the Americas, from bold visions emerging from Nigeria, Ethiopia and Botswana to the nuanced dynamics between Austria, France and South Africa — this year’s programme celebrates multiplicity, movement and mutual learning.

RMB Talent Unlocked 

For over a decade, RMB Talent Unlocked has been a powerful force in identifying, nurturing and showcasing emerging South African artists.

This year, RMB Talent Unlocked introduces 50 artists who have come through the programme. The presentation offers a compelling cross-section of artistic voices from across the country, highlighting diverse mediums, practices and perspectives that reflect the richness and complexity of contemporary South African art.

For these artists, the presentation at RMB Latitudes marks a critical moment in their journey — a chance to present their work to collectors, curators and art lovers in a professional, high-profile setting.

INDEX

RMB Latitudes’ annual Independent Artist Exhibition, INDEX, champions accessibility in the arts by spotlighting talent outside the traditional gallery system.

It connects independent artists directly with audiences, collectors and gallerists to boost their visibility and support long-term growth. Curated by celebrated artist Bonolo Kavula, this year’s edition is titled Invisible Thread and offers a space dedicated to experimentation and new voices.

It weaves together the work of eight independent artists in a collective exploration of identity, connection and materiality. Through a range of media — from thread and textiles to sculpture and print — these artists engage in a shared dialogue. The group exhibition includes works by Yonela Doda, Thato Makatu, Tshepo Phokojoe, Khanyi Mawhayi, Dineo Ponde, Unathi Mkonto, Tinyiko Makwakwa and Kavula herself, included as a gesture of collaboration and mentorship, reflecting her ongoing creative dialogue with the group.

Disturbed Currents: Art for a warming world 

Each year at RMB Latitudes, the outdoor spaces of Shepstone Gardens are transformed into an open-air exhibition — a place where art, nature and urgent ideas intersect.

Disturbed Currents, a collaborative outdoor installation by Dutch artist Thirza Schaap and South African artist Nina Barnett, interrogates ecology through distinct but complementary lenses.

"Plastic ocean-splash of pink" by ©Thirza Schaap

Schaap, renowned for her Plastic Ocean series, creates seductive yet unsettling sculptures from plastic waste collected on beaches. At first glance joyful and colourful, her works quickly reveal darker truths about consumption, pollution and waste culture.

Barnett, by contrast, traces the flow of water across Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand Ridge — a watershed where rivers divide to reach two oceans. Her spatial interventions, drawings and videos treat water not just as a resource, but as a political and emotional force. Together, their work confronts us with environmental fragility, inviting collective reflection and accountability.

ESSAY: Tracing modernist lineages 

For a sculptor, a sketch might be a fleeting idea — a quick way to commit thought to paper — but drawing and sculpture share a profound, symbiotic relationship. Each informs and deepens the other. ESSAY focuses on the drawings and sculptures of two prolific South African artists: Sydney Kumalo and Amalie von Maltitz.

Sydney Kumalo's "Great Expectations", 1976 (Photograph: Supplied)

Installed in the Chapel space, ESSAY pairs Kumalo’s charcoal and pastel drawings with von Maltitz’s expressive clay forms. Though their careers never quite intersected, both artists share an enduring concern with figuration, abstraction and the human form. Together, their work opens a dialogue about lineage, influence and legacy — and invites a reconsideration of what modernism means within a South African context.

Mary Sibande: A Queen Never Dies

Mary Sibande’s established practice, centred on her iconic alter ego Queen Sophie, invites audiences on a journey of strength, transformation and identity reclamation within the context of black South African women’s history. Queen Sophie confronts historical injustices while envisioning future agency.

In collaboration with Usurpa, Sibande ventures into new media with A Queen Never Dies, presented within the turret at Shepstone Gardens.

Visitors will encounter a holographic representation of Queen Sophie, a technological and artistic exploration. The hologram’s creation involved the precise capture of an existing three-dimensional sculpture using laser technology.

The process entailed illuminating the sculpture with a coherent light source, beam splitting, and recording the interference pattern to preserve its depth and form. Upon illumination, the hologram projects a three-dimensional image, offering a novel mode of engagement with Sibande's work and indicating an expansion of her artistic practice into digital realms.

Design Week South Africa art. 

Launched in 2024 by Margot Molyneux, Design Week South Africa is an expansive initiative celebrating the future of South African design through events and immersive experiences that promote knowledge-sharing, inclusivity, and support for emerging talent.

Lady from the Orient

For Vladimir Tretchikoff fans, Lady from the Orient will be exhibited alongside a curated selection of important modern and contemporary works from Strauss & Co’s flagship live sale.

Southern Guild: A dual presentation of new work by Xanthe Somers and Terence Maluleke   

The winner of Latitude’s annual ANNA Award last year, Somers will debut a series of large-scale ceramic sculptures as a special project at the fair. Maluleke will exhibit mixed-media paintings paying intimate homage to the city of Joburg, where he lives and works. 

New work by Xanthe Somers and Terence Maluleke (Photo: Anthea Pokroy & Southern Guild)

Xanthe Somers: Wearing Thin 

A Zimbabwean ceramic artist based in London, Somers created her new body of work in Cape Town while on an artist residency that formed part of her ANNA Award.

The collection of braided vessel-like forms is a progression from the monumental pieces in her 2024 solo presentation, Invisible Hand, which explored traditions of basket-making in Zimbabwe and the value of women’s work in post-colonial contexts.

Titled Wearing Thin, the latest series is marked by a sense of unravelling: the works’ surfaces are articulated by interwoven strands of clay that have become untethered at certain junctures. Their rotund forms buckle inwards as they seem to succumb to their own weight. A fissure interrupts the warp and weft of a tall ovoid vessel, and everywhere the fringes begin to fray.

Weaving is a powerful metaphor for social cohesion, storytelling, and the slow and repetitive nature of domestic work — cleaning, mending, stitching, sewing and cooking. In their exuberant display of colour and attention to scale, Somers’ ceramics celebrate the creativity and mindfulness inherent in all these associations, but in exploring the limits of their making — and by implication, their functionality — she points to some of the structural imbalances too. It is commonly accepted that gender divides prioritise formal work over domestic work and care-taking in capitalist economies, and undervalue handicraft in contrast to art (traditionally the purview of men). Yet, even more insidious than these divides is the intersection of race, gender and class that forms the very foundation of our current milieu.

The series also reflects on the power of cloth and clay to hold narrative, carrying symbols and images that speak of historic events, convey standards of beauty and display political allegiances. Somers is interested in how contemporary material culture bears the legacy of colonialism by conveying Western conceptions of womanhood and aesthetic value, perpetuating the erasure of indigenous traditions and principles.

Terence Maluleke: A Love Letter to Joburg, First Draft

Maluleke’s new series of paintings, A Love Letter to Joburg, First Draft, springs from a deep engagement with and love for the urban fabric of his birthplace — the shifting terrain of a city in the constant process of being made and remade, by its enterprising, everyday inhabitants.

Born and raised in Soweto, he recalls minibus taxi rides with his mother to buy bulk items at inner-city wholesale stores: “As you arrived in the city, there was a sensation of going inside a humming, moving machine. There was something enticing about the towering buildings, the buzz, the feeling that really important things took place there.”

As a student at the National School of the Arts in Braamfontein, Maluleke began to form his own internal map of the city, learning to navigate its more dangerous spots and finding a sense of beauty and community among the informal traders, street vendors, commuters and residents sharing the streets.

“Many of these people are occupying space they shouldn’t, but as a community, they are making it work together. There is a deep human intent and a spirit of collaboration to survive in this environment, to improvise infrastructure and create a livelihood.”

Made in his studio in Doornfontein, Maluleke’s paintings capture real and imagined vignettes of public and private life: an indoor scene of lovers locked in an embrace, safe from the orange flares of gunfire outside; a pair of squawking hadedas — Joburg’s ubiquitous birds — perched atop a stack of plastic chairs; a potted plant at a window overlooking warehouses and the Hillbrow Tower.

His narrative approach encompasses the sombre reality of life on the economic margins with a portrait of an exhausted zama zama (illegal miner), taking stock of the tragic price paid by others who have ventured into abandoned mines. Maluleke’s palette is suffused with yellow tones calling to mind the city’s infamous mine dumps and vistas of sun-bleached veld, but simultaneously registering beats of hope and optimism.

He leans into abstraction, fragmenting his picture plane into multiple perspectives and turning burglar bars and checkerboard flooring into framing devices. Mixing charcoal and pencilwork with paint, Maluleke builds textured layers and keeps much of his linework visible. His brushwork stops just short of the canvas edge — in progress, rugged and exposed.

There’s a defiance and a humanity about the world he is building in this new body of work, whose inhabitants “have a disregard for a system that sometimes feels like it’s not for them. But they still occupy it. It’s as if they are saying, ‘Before the system catches up, you’ll find us here. There is a gap that needs to be filled, and that’s where you’ll find us.’” DM

The Botswana Focus will be at the Great Hall Rooftop at RMB Latitudes; RMB Talent Unlocked will be showcased in The Manor, Stand E2; INDEX will be at Glass Marquee, Stand C3 at RMB Latitudes; ESSAY is in the Chapel space at RMB Latitudes. Shepstone Gardens is at 12 Hope Road, Mountain View, Johannesburg.