Book Review
ASHRAF JAMAL: STRANGE CARGO
“He has written with equal intensity about artists old and young, dead or alive, famous or relatively unknown, black or white, trending or not.”
Written primarily between 2019 and 2021, and set to be published by Skira in January 2022. It can be regarded as the twin of Jamal’s previous book, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art (2017), which Afonso Dias Ramos described as ‘unlike any publication on the topic . . . a masterclass in arts criticism.’ In this, Strange Cargo is no different. Both form part of a single venture to celebrate and entrench the rich complexity of South African artists in a global imaginary. The artists that Jamal chooses to reflect upon refuse to fit into a predictive algorithm. He has written with equal intensity about artists old and young, dead or alive, famous or relatively unknown, black or white, trending or not. Love and empa-thy—his indifference to difference—is hisengine room, and much like the artists featured, Jamal does not only write for the moment we are in, but for a readership to come.
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A painful, beautiful, and incisive portrait of what was, what is, and what might come. Ashraf Jamal makes the tension between artistic practice, history, and society palpable in this series of searing essays, capturing the spirit and essence of the South African landscape of contemporary art.’—Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz MOCAA and Founding Director of RAW Material Company. Available in March 2022 from good bookshops near you Pre-orders: to: no.ism.no.skism@gmail.com by 10 January 2022 to secure your copy at a discounted rate of R900 (while stocks last).
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