Last weekend, the Culture Club team made their way to Pietermaritzburg for the inaugural KZN Art Fair, where our Johannesburg and Durban teams got a rare chance to reunite and experience a significant moment for KZN’s art scene together. Launched as a new platform for KwaZulu-Natal’s visual arts ecosystem, the KZN Art Fair set out to carve a place for the province on the national art calendar, bringing together galleries, artists, collectives and creative practitioners from the region and beyond. We arrived with no expectations, only eager to see what the province had to offer and, more importantly, how it would present itself through this new platform.
We chose Saturday deliberately. The fair ran from Thursday to Sunday and we wanted to experience it alongside the everyday visitor. Upon arriving at the Hilton College estate, our first encounter with the fair was, ironically, one of confusion. The security at the gate seemed unsure of where the KZN Art Fair was being held, and when we tried to explain that we were looking for Memorial Hall, we were repeatedly directed towards the Hilton Arts Festival instead. There was plenty of signage directing visitors towards the festival, but little to none indicating where the Art Fair was located. After being waved through and eventually parking at the Sandile Zungu Pavilion, we realised we were on the opposite end of what felt like a maze of a campus. Our hunt for the fair therefore began on foot. Thankfully, Hilton College’s impressively detailed campus map came to the rescue and, with our phones in hand, we navigated our way towards Memorial Hall.
As we entered the first exhibition hall, we were almost immediately drawn to Booth 19, where the spiritual photographs of Sethembiso Zulu were on display. Zulu’s practice is deeply informed by his experience as a Zionist healer and his photographs carry a sense of spirituality, ritual and ancestral knowledge. Set against the booth’s white walls, the photographs took on a quiet sacredness that made the space feel devotional.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal Fine Arts booth was another standout, showcasing work by the university’s postgraduate students and giving us a glimpse into the future of KZN art. The works felt attuned to the present moment while still acknowledging the past, with themes ranging from womanhood and Black joy to the enduring legacy of apartheid. It was refreshing to see these emerging artists engage with history by finding new ways to remember and honour it.
In the second exhibition hall, the scale shifted. The booths felt more spacious and the mix of offerings expanded to include books and design. Among them was the KZNSA Gallery, whose presence extended beyond the walls of the booth and into the publications they had brought along. It was here that Asande, one of our Durban-based team members, introduced us to iJusi, a South African magazine dedicated to showcasing the country’s visual culture. Having encountered it herself through her visits to the KZNSA Gallery, she put the rest of us onto it, and in no time we were all leaving with our own issues in hand.
Within that same space, we were met with the monumental work of Mmangaliso Nzuza, this year’s Artist Spotlight. It felt like a full-circle moment: Nzuza began developing his artistic practice as a student at Hilton College, where he matriculated in 2016, and now, years later, his work was being celebrated as the fair’s Artist Spotlight in that very same space.
By this point, I was beginning to notice a recurring thread throughout the fair: remembering. At The Herd, Mbali Mthethwa’s Letters to My Grandfather explored grief, nostalgia and the effects of colonialism on the Black home through beadwork. Mthethwa’s wider practice treats beadwork as more than ornamentation, instead using it as a site of knowledge production where histories of labour, gender and cultural transmission can be preserved and reimagined. At Contemporary Archive Project, this conversation with memory continued through street photography, juxtaposing sites and spaces across KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Cape Town, creating an archive of place through the everyday.
Overall, experiencing an art fair in KwaZulu-Natal for the first time as someone from Johannesburg was an incredibly rewarding experience. We were introduced to artists, publications and emerging creatives we may not have encountered otherwise. For a first edition, we can already see the potential for it to become an annual fixture on the national arts calendar, creating more space for KZN-based artists and giving local audiences something of their own to look forward to. We feel fortunate to have witnessed the beginning of that journey and even more so to have been entrusted with the responsibility of reflecting on it.
